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V29 2026 INDEX E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 29, Number 19, 2026, Article 30

Here are some additional items in the media this week that may be of interest. -Editor

Dick Hanscom passed along this Daily Mail article about a recently discovered ninth century gold coin. Thanks. -Editor

A person searching for possible treasure with a metal detector in the UK's county of Norfolk recently found a small, incomplete gold coin which had been turned into a pendant.

An analysis revealed that the coin was from the late ninth century, likely between the 860s and 870s AD, a time when Vikings had just conquered the kingdom of East Anglia in eastern England and were establishing control over the region.

Strangely, this coin displayed the face of a bearded man with the Latin word 'IOAN,' which is short for John.

The other side had a partial Latin inscription that appeared to read 'Baptist and Evangelist' after being translated to English by experts.

Although Vikings of this time were thought to be mostly pagan during this era, worshipping the Norse Gods such as Odin and Thor, the strange coin has opened up a mystery, suggesting that Vikings actually turned to Christianity decades before historians currently believe.

Moreover, the image of John the Baptist, Jesus's cousin who often prepared the masses for his arrival in the Bible, was considered a shocking find.

Coins from this century in Western Europe typically displayed the portrait of kings or emperors, not religious figures.

Howard Berlin passed along this story of a 13-year-old's find of a rare Greek coin in Germany. Thanks. -Editor

While walking through Berlin's western neighborhood of Spandau, a 13-year-old made a discovery that has been hailed as highly significant in Germany's archaeological history.

He found a small bronze coin, which experts have since dated 2,300 years — back to the ancient Greek city of Troy, in present-day Turkey.

From there, the coin passed from expert to expert in an attempt to determine its origins.

Eventually, it was an expert at the Münzkabinett Berlin (Numismatic Collection), which holds one of the world's most significant collections of coins, who said that the coin definitely originated from the ancient Greek city of Troy.

bronze coin of troy found in Germany on display

The coin dates to the Hellenistic period, to 281 and 261 BC. Its references to ancient Greece are clear: On one side, it depicts the warrior goddess Athena wearing a Corinthian helmet, on the other, Athena wears a headdress and has a spear and a spindle.

The small bronze coin weighs only 7 grams (0.25 ounces) and measures 12 millimeters (0.5 inches) and is currently on display at Berlin's PETRI museum in the "current finds" exhibition space.

Leon Saryan passed along this article about a haord discovered in Czechoslovakia. "LIKE A JACKPOT. MORE THAN 2000 MEDIEVAL DENARIAS WERE HIDDEN". Thanks. -Editor

This article highlights two men who bet their fortunes on the success of the United States during the country's most trying times - Robert Morris and George F. Baker. -Editor

America's semiquincentennial would be a sad and grudging affair without a nod to the nation's founding capitalists. Robert Morris, the "Financier of the Revolution," donated his own fortune to supply the raggedy and underpaid armies of George Washington. George F. Baker sold the bonds that raised the money that equipped the Union side in the Civil War. Along with the statesmen and the generals and the keepers of the home fires, the moneybags deserve their day in the sun, too.

Morris and Baker were rich, bold, indomitable, enterprising, self-made, proficient, cool in a crisis, and incapable of despair. Each was an unshakable optimist on the American future. "While you may make many mistakes," J.P. Morgan's father advised his son, "never be a bear on your country or you will surely go broke." Baker, who heard the story directly from the younger Morgan, was always a bull, too. Morris, who died in 1806, seven years before the birth of the elder Morgan, was no less an optimist. Indeed, Morris's heavily encumbered purchases of millions of acres of American wilderness in the 1790s ultimately cost him his fortune.

Historians have thought the less of Morris for dying broke, but the financier was a nonpareil, rich or poor: successful merchant and ship owner; early opponent of overbearing British colonial rule; tireless advocate of American independence; logistical, commercial, and maritime genius of the Second Continental Congress. "For three critical months in the winter of 1777," wrote his biographer, Charles Rappleye, "when Congress fled Philadelphia for the relative safety of Baltimore, Morris ran the operations of the American government virtually single-handed."

To read the complete article, see:
The Men Who Bankrolled America (https://www.thefp.com/p/the-men-who-bankrolled-america)

The Newman Numismatic Portal uses the Internet Archive to store digitized documents and archive numismatic websites. This article notes how the recent surge in demand for hard drives is raising costs. The photo is of the Internet Archive's headquarters building in San Francisco. -Editor

Internet Archive's headquarters building

Skyrocketing hard drive and storage costs caused by the AI data center boom are making it more expensive and more difficult for digital archivists, academics, Wikipedia, and hobby data hoarders to save data and archive the internet. Specific drives favored by some high profile organizations like the Internet Archive have become far more expensive or are difficult to find at all, archivists said.

Over the last several months, prices for both consumer level and enterprise solid state drives, hard drives, and other types of storage have skyrocketed. As an example, a 2TB external Samsung SSD I purchased last fall for $159 now costs $575. PC Part Picker, a website that tracks the average price of different types of drives, shows a universal increase in storage prices starting in about October of last year. Prices of many of the drives it tracks have doubled or increased by more than 150 percent, and at some stores SSDs and hard drives are simply sold out. There is now even a secondary market for some SSDs, with people scalping them on eBay and elsewhere.

Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine, the most important archiving projects in the history of the internet, told 404 Media that the skyrocketing costs of storage is "a very real issue costing us time and money."

"We have found that the preferred 28-30TB drives are just not available or at very high price," Kahle said. "We gather over 100 terabytes of new materials each day, and we have over 210 Petabytes of materials already archived on machines that need continuous upgrades and maintenance, so we need to constantly get new hard drives."

In another challenge for the Internet Archive, major publishers have begun blocking the Wayback Machine. Sign their petition calling on major news outlets to work with the Internet Archive to keep journalism preserved in the Wayback Machine. Add your name to support preserving the news for future generations, and to help ensure today's reporting remains accessible. -Editor

In the latest episode of the Future Knowledge podcast, "Preserving the Web in the Age of AI," Wayback Machine director Mark Graham, tech policy expert Mike Masnick, and media lawyer Kendra Albert discuss the reports that some news publishers are blocking the Wayback Machine from archiving their websites due to unfounded concerns over AI scraping.

For Graham, it's an issue of supporting journalism and the historical record. The Wayback Machine has become "collateral damage caught up in the conflict between AI companies and publishers."

As Graham recounts encounters with reporters and researchers, a clear pattern emerges: even the most well-resourced institutions cannot fully preserve their own digital history. The Wayback Machine has become an indispensable backstop, ensuring that the public record remains accessible even when original sources disappear.

"I was in the offices of The New York Times just a few weeks ago," said Graham, noting that The New York Times has blocked the Wayback Machine from archiving its website, "and a senior researcher came up to me and said, ‘Oh my God, Mark, thank you so much for the Wayback Machine. We use you all the time. There is material available that we've used from the Wayback Machine that we can't even find in our own archives.' I get those stories all the time."

For Masnick, blocking the Wayback Machine "will be seen as a huge mistake by those media organizations, an overreaction to a problem that probably isn't really a problem."

In the other-fun-collecting-hobbies department, here's a Heritage Intelligent Collector article about a collector who stretched to obtain a Holy Grail item for his collection. -Editor

Action-Comics No. 1 Superman issue cover

One day he got a telephone call letting him know his had been the highest bid for a copy of Action Comics No. 1, the 1938 issue that introduced Superman to the world — the Holy Grail of the hobby then and now. The bid he'd made was ridiculously low for the pinnacle of comics collecting, half its value if even that, but nonetheless a head-swimming amount of money for a young working man.

Some 40 years later, his copy of Action Comics No. 1, the longtime top issue in the Overstreet Comic Price Guide, [was] the headline lot of Heritage Auctions' May 7-9 Comic Books Signature® Auction.