CRUSADERS' GOLD COIN HOARD FOUND IN ISRAEL

Stephen Pradier writes:

A pot of gold from the Crusades worth up to $500,000 has been found buried in an ancient Roman fortress in Israel.

The coins were buried by Christian soldiers of the order of the Knights Hospitalier as the Crusaders faced an unstoppable attack by a huge Muslim army. The knights were annihilated in April 1265.

The coins - worth a fortune even in 1265 when they were thought to have been buried - were deliberately hidden inside a broken jug to prevent them being discovered. The fortress was destroyed in April 1265 by forces of Mamluks who overwhelmed the Crusaders - and the treasure only survived due to the quick thinking of one of the defenders. 'It was in a small juglet, and it was partly broken,' Oren Tal of the University of Tel Aviv told Fox News.

'The idea was to put something broken in the ground and fill it with sand, in order to hide the gold coins within. If by chance somebody were to find the juglet, he won’t excavate it, he won’t look inside it to find the gold coins. Once we started to sift it, the gold came out.' The Roman fortress in Apollonia National Park has yielded a huge number of archaeological treasures - but scientists excavating layer from the thirteenth century were stunned to unearth a literal pot of gold.

The clay container had more than 100 gold dinals from the time when the Crusaders occupied the fortress, originally built by the Romans.

The coins discovered in the fort date to the Fatimid empire in northern Africa, and are 200-300 years older than the ruined fortress they found in. The coins were minted in Tripoli and Alexandria - and are extremely valuable.

'Fatimid coins are very difficult to study,' says Oren Tal, 'The letters are sometimes very difficult to decipher.'

To read the complete article, see: The Crusaders' last stand: Pot of gold worth £300,000 found in fortress where it was buried by doomed force of Christian knights (www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2171883/Treasure-Crusaders
-stand-Pot-gold-worth-300-000-fortress-buried-doomed-Christian-knights.html)

The joint team from Tel Aviv University and Israel’s Nature and Parks Authority were working at Apollonia National Park, an ancient Roman fortress on the coast used by the Crusaders between 1241 and 1265, when they literally found a pot of gold.

“All in all, we found some 108 dinals and quarter dinals, which makes it one of the largest gold coin hauls discovered in a medieval site in the land of Israel,” Prof. Oren Tal, chairman of Tel Aviv University’s Department of Archaeology, told FoxNews.com.

Once his team has finished deciphering the coins and decoding their inscriptions, they will be transferred to a museum. But with such a valuable find, there’s already a quarrel between two archaeologically oriented museums over which will host them.

Tal said the Israel Museum in Jerusalem is in the running, as is the Eretz (or Land of Israel) Museum in Tel Aviv.

“Both want the coins on display. It’s not for us to decide,” Tal said.

To read the complete article, see: Gold coins from time of Crusades found in Israeli ruins (www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/07/10/gold-coins-from-time-crusades
-found-in-israeli-ruins/)

And another one from Arthur Shippee (via his Facebook friend Helen Gaudette): 1,000-year-old hoard of gold coins dug up at Crusades site (www.msnbc.msn.com/id/48154827/ns/technology_and_science-
science/t/-year-old-hoard-gold-coins-dug-crusades-site/)

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