They really struck gold.
Two Israeli teenagers on their summer break unearthed a clay jar filled with hundreds of gold coins that had sat undisturbed for more than 1,100 years.
The 18-year-olds were volunteering at an archaeological dig near the city of Yavne last week when they made the “extremely rare” find of 425 complete gold coins, the Israel Antiquities Authority said in a statement Monday.
“It was amazing,” said Oz Cohen, one of teens who made the discovery.
“I dug in the ground and, when I excavated the soil, saw what looked like very thin leaves. When I looked again, I saw these were gold coins,” Cohen said. “It was really exciting to find such a special and ancient treasure.”
The coins — which are made of pure 24-karat gold and weigh less than 2 pounds — date back to the end of the 9th century, when the Islamic Abbasid Caliphate controlled most of the Near East and North Africa, the IAA said.
The stash would have gone a long way at the time, according to Robert Kool, a coin expert with the authority.
“With such a sum, a person could buy a luxurious house in one of the best neighborhoods in Fustat, the enormous wealthy capital of Egypt in those days,” Kool said in the statement.
Finding such a trove is extremely rare, since gold was often melted down and reused by later civilizations, the experts said.
The coins were found “in excellent condition, as if buried the day before,” said IAA archaeologists Liat Nadav-Ziv and Elie Haddad in a joint statement.
Whoever buried the treasure “expected to retrieve it and even secured the vessel with a nail so that it would not move,” they said.
“We can only guess what prevented him from returning to collect this treasure.”
