I think the "fake hoard" theory can be discounted. These coins were found by an accredited archaeological team at a proper archaeological site in Turkey and will therefore never come onto the market, and anyone claiming that their coins came from this hoard would be promptly investigated by Turkish authorities. They have nothing to gain by creating fake artifacts.
Turkey has a major problem with looted and smuggled ancient coins leaving the country, but they never leave via museums or officially announced archaeological finds. Any coins known or suspected to be stolen from museum collections will not be salable in the West as Turkey will attempt repatriation. You will notice they waited over a year before announcing the find; that's because they wanted to get all the archaeology done on the site to prevent thieves from breaking in overnight and looting them.
As for being fake, the archaeological evidence proves otherwise. Quite the opposite, in fact: as the article states, the coins still have an imprecise dating sequence, and the datable finds in the archaeological layers surrounding the coins may help yield insights into when the coins were struck.
And to finish with just some trivia about the coins themselves: they are considered part of the "Biblical coin series", as they are the oldest coins mentioned in the Bible and the only coin mentioned in the Old Testament: 1 Chronicles 29:7 and elsewhere use the Hebrew word "darkemon", transliterated into Greek as "dareikos" and thus to English as "daric". A passage in Ezra 8:27 even mentions the use of "daric" as a unit of currency, rather than merely a weight, where a set of fine-crafted gold bowls is "valued at 1000 darics". So Sel is correct in this, that these coins are worth much more than their weight in gold.
Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise, you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. - C. S. Lewis
Posted 09/02/2024 7:34 pm
