BAR Jr.: Sharp Eyes Find Ancient Treasure on the Beach
048
Whenever plundering armies approached or civil commotion threatened, wise and wealthy ancient Israelites dashed to hide their coins. They stuffed them into jars or perforated jugs and even into oil lamps, then secreted their savings behind the plaster of the walls of their homes, under stairwells, in caves or in any other place 049unlikely to attract the eyes of frenzied looters. Sometimes they hid them so well that, if the owners were slain, the hoards of coins remained untouched for almost two millennia.
Twentieth-century archaeologists, both amateur and professional, have periodically stumbled across these hiding places. A hoard of 139 bronze coins, beginning with the reign of Agrippa I (37–44 A.D.) was found in an oil lamp during excavations of a first century A.D. building at Kibbutz Ein Gedi on the shores of the Dead Sea. Shekels from the war between the Jews and the occupying Romans during 66–70 A.D. were found in a bronze pyxis in Jerusalem’s Silwan Valley. But the most spectacular find of all was discovered by an inexpert volunteer during the mid-1960s when archaeologists unearthed the walled city of Kurnub, some 24 miles southeast of Beer-sheva, which was built in the first century A.D. by skilled water conservationists and traders known as the Nabataeans. Stuffed into a bronze jar hidden in a stairwell were more than 10,000 Roman provincial silver tetradrachms, most of which had been struck during the third century A.D.
Treasure trove of this quantity is rare, but scattered ancient Byzantine coins are there for the taking on the beaches of Caesarea, midway between Tel Aviv and Haifa on the Mediterranean coast. A few years ago my reserve army duties took me to a northern coastal area within easy hitch-hiking distance of Caesarea, a former Roman capital of Palestine and now dotted with spacious villas of the wealthy. More than 100,000 people had lived in this grandiose harbor city soon after Herod the Great built it in the first century B.C. They had amused themselves in the vast amphitheater and hippodrome when not frolicking on the sandy beaches framed by the arched aqueduct. But more important to treasure hunters than these sumptuous expressions of wealth is the fact that Caesarea had its own mint.
Working on an amateurish hunch that the ancients would have dropped money while idling on the beach before or after amphitheatrical 050entertainment, I decided to spend a 24-hour leave looking for coins of the period on the beach closest to this colossal open-air theater.
“You’ll come back with nothing but sun-stroke,” scoffed one reservist.
Undaunted, I arrived at the beach below the amphitheater, now restored for concerts during the annual Israel Festival. The beach frames a cove about 150 yards long which swimmers shy clear of because it is strewn with pebbles, sand, rocks, boulders, fragments of Roman columns and chunks of oil the size of human skulls. Its 15-foot width is bordered by a 12-foot-high earthen embankment thickly studded with ancient pottery sherds and slivers of multi-hued Byzantine glass.
As I clambered down I noticed a young boy, about nine years old, staring at me as the surf washed over his bare feet. With the bluntness of Israelis, we immediately made our intentions known to each other. Gidon said he’d been looking for coins for days, ever since a friend of his sister had found a Roman coin on this beach during the summer vacation. But he himself hadn’t turned up anything.
“Okay,” I said, “let’s suppose you start that side and I’ll look over.”
Before I could finish the sentence my eyes riveted on a rounded, flat disc with green specks lying on a patch of clear sand near my boots. I scooped it up. My fingers were trembling in the first flush of discovery. The disc was weighty and covered in black oil and congealed dirt.
“It’s a coin!” I burst out.
Gidon peered closer.
“How do you know?” he asked in the mournful tone of a victim of daylight robbery.
“Look at the flecks of green,” I explained, pointing to the rim of the disc. “That forms on old copper.”
Then I told him how, a year earlier, I’d spotted a coin caked in mud on an Israeli farming settlement bordering Lebanon. It, too, had a rusty green coloring on the edges. When I’d taken it to the Kadman Numismatic Museum in Tel Aviv for cleaning, the director, Dr. Arye Kindler, had identified it as a 20 nummia piece from the year 576 A.D., during the reign of the Emperor Tiberius II Constantine, whose bust was clearly visible after cleaning.
“It’s not fair!” said the hapless Gidon. “I’ve been looking for days and haven’t found a thing.”
But he soon did. About two hours later we were ambling near the surf when I shouted, “Look at that!” He was shorter than I so he reached it first with a yelp of delight. The coin was smaller than a dime and almost completely rounded, with only specks of oil embossed on the otherwise dull brown color of old copper.
Gidon and I spent the next three hours combing the beach like a pair of obsessed detectives. We walked slowly up and down the beach. We squatted on rocks half submerged in the incoming tide and peered down into limpid pools of water where small crabs and fish moved. Every few minutes he would yell, “Did you find anything?” But we didn’t.
During our search we learned from a strolling veteran of nearby Kibbutz Sdot Yam that the ancient coins had probably come from the level of earth above the embankment. According to him, Italian archaeologists excavating the amphitheater in 1961 had dumped their rubble in carts, wheeled these along a short track of parallel steel rails and dumped the unsifted contents onto the beach below.
Later that day we saw two young men scratching with their fingers around the rocks 051below the steel tracks, which still jut out from the top of the embankment. Zvika and Rami taught us how to search for coins in the most unlikely places, between two stable rocks, preferably wedged in a V-shape. The ebb and flow of the tide, they said, churned the sand and pebbles and the lightweight coins would get trapped at the point where the rocks met. Our new friends demonstrated how to scratch with the fingers of one hand and to sift methodically through a palm-full of beach sand for the telltale sign of copper or bronze rusted to a powdery light or spinach-green over the centuries.
Zvika and Rami were the first of a half dozen men I came to know who were compulsively drawn back to the beach every weekend in search of coins. One of them waded into the calm sea five or six yards offshore, donning flippers, snorkel and goggles and carrying a bucket and short-handled shovel. He would return with a bucket full of ocean sand and carefully drain it through a sieve like a prospector panning for gold. But his success in finding coins was generally neither more nor less than ours on dry land.
Back at the military base my find caused something of a stir. The soldier detailed to clean the washrooms glanced at the coin and came back with chumsat melach, the regular caustic soda every Israeli housewife uses to clean bathrooms. He told me to immerse the coin in a few teaspoonsful with water for half an hour. I stood guard over the mug watching the liquid bubble and sizzle as dirt floated to the top. Then I ran tap-water for five minutes into the cup before reaching in and grabbing the coin. The outline of a human face stared back at me from the surface of the coin!
Two weeks passed before I could take it to Dr. Kindler in Tel Aviv. He scrubbed it with a hard wire brush and within seconds pronounced it as a facial portrait of Emperor Maurice Tiberius who had reigned from 582 to 602 A.D. The reverse side showed clearly the double X categorizing it as a 20 nummia piece, and the letters ANNO V, identifying it as having been minted in the fifth year of his rule. The Byzantine cross above the XX was as clear as if it had been minted recently.
After half a dozen visits to the same beach I had accumulated more than 20 coins, some of them plucked from the surface of the earthen embankment. All were in such bad condition that it did not matter that I cleaned them first with caustic soda and then with a pot scourer made of steel wool. After much rubbing, one coin showed the elaborate N-shaped monogram of the Emperor Anastasius I who ruled the empire from 491 to 518 A.D. The design on an even smaller coin in better condition was identified by Dr. Yaacov Meshorer, chief curator of the Samuel Bronfman Biblical and Archaeological Museum (within Jerusalem’s Israel Museum complex) as a palm tree, minted at Caesarea in the fourth century A.D.
Meshorer and Kindler estimated the market value of my best coins at about $10 each, based on quality, availability and demand. A second century Chinese coin may be worth a few hundred dollars while a silver shekel from Bar Kochba’s revolt against the Romans in the second century A.D. may change hands for tens of thousands of dollars because of its rarity and unrelenting interest to coin collectors.
Meshorer is so inundated with requests from amateur archaeologists wanting to know how to clean their coins that he has Xeroxed printed handouts of instruction. His technique involves soaking bronze coins for one or two days in a small glass dish holding a solution of distilled water, potassium sodium tartarate and caustic soda. The softened dirt is then removed from the surface of the coins with a soft brush or fine wire wool. If some dirt still clings to the coin, Meshorer recommends soaking it for a few minutes in ten per cent concentrated sulphuric acid and then returning it to the previous solution. The completely clean coin must be boiled in a pyrex glass filled anew with distilled water at least three times to ensure complete removal of all chemical traces. To prevent further encrustation, a coating of polyvinyl acetate will do the trick—and make identification so much easier for treasure hunters two thousand years hence.
Whenever plundering armies approached or civil commotion threatened, wise and wealthy ancient Israelites dashed to hide their coins. They stuffed them into jars or perforated jugs and even into oil lamps, then secreted their savings behind the plaster of the walls of their homes, under stairwells, in caves or in any other place 049unlikely to attract the eyes of frenzied looters. Sometimes they hid them so well that, if the owners were slain, the hoards of coins remained untouched for almost two millennia. Twentieth-century archaeologists, both amateur and professional, have periodically stumbled across these hiding places. A hoard of […]
You have already read your free article for this month. Please join the BAS Library or become an All Access member of BAS to gain full access to this article and so much more.
Already a library member? Log in here.
Institution user? Log in with your IP address or Username