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Hundreds of Millennium-Old Gold Coins Uncovered in Israel

Aug. 27 2020

Participating in an excavation as part of their mandatory national service, two young Israelis discovered a trove of gold coins from the 10th century CE, when the Baghdad-based Abbasid caliphate ruled most of the Middle East, including the Land of Israel. The Jerusalem Post reports:

“The cache, deliberately buried in the ground inside a clay jug, held 424 gold coins, with most dated to the early Islamic period and the Abbasid dynasty,” explained Liat Nadav-Ziv and Eli Hadad, the administrators of the dig. “The person who buried his treasure 1,100 years ago definitely expected to come back to take it, and even fixed the vessel with a nail so that it would not move.”

It’s unknown why the person who buried the coins didn’t return to get them.

Robert Cole, a coin expert at the Israel Antiquities Authority, explained that the coin cache was one of the oldest ever found from the Abbasid period. The coins were made of 846 grams of solid 24-karat gold. “A significant amount of money in those days,” explained Cole. “For example with a sum [of cash] like this, a person could buy a fancy house in one of the best neighborhoods in Fustat, the capital of Egypt” [where Moses Maimonides would later make his home].

Read more at Jerusalem Post

More about: Ancient Israel, Archaeology

 

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic