Archaeologists Discovered 160 Mysterious Coins Stuffed in the Walls of an Ancient Building

• Approximately 160 coins minted around 80 B.C. were discovered stashed in the walls of a building in the Jordan Valley.

• The ancient coins include inscriptions that tie to Alexander Jannaeus, king of the Hasmoneans.

• Just why such a large stash of coins was placed into a wall is a questions archaeologists hope to answer.

Since piggy banks probably weren’t around 2,000 years ago, people had to store their money in some pretty creative places—and some of it is still right where they left it. While searching among ruins in the Jordan Valley, archaeologists dug into a wall and discovered approximately 160 ancient coins, all dating to the first century B.C.

They found the coins at the Ruim es-Sia archaeological site in the Jordan Valley, which could have once been a key stopping point for travelers heading to the Hasmonean fortress of Sartaba. The site features a storage area and buildings, and is located on the banks of a river near a fortress, which could provide some clues as to why the coins ended up where they did.“The site that the cache was discovered at is probably a road station that was not recognized in the research so far,” Shay Bar, archaeologist at the University of Haifa, said in a translated statement.

The coins are easy enough to identify, with each one bearing an inscription mentioning King Alexander Jannaeus, ruler of the Hasmoneans, on one side. That inscription appearing in both Aramaic and Greek indicates that the coins were minted in the 25^th year of the king’s reign, which dates to between 80 and 79 B.C. Each of the coins are the same, according to Yoav Ferry of the Eretz Israel Museum, with the king’s inscriptions on one side and an eight-pointed star on the other.

The Jordan Valley area where the coins were discovered was ruled by the Hasmoneans following a successful revolt against the Seleucid dynasty. The descendants of the family of King Alexander Jannaeus reigned until late in the first century B.C., when the Romans conquered the area. King Herod put a final stop to any Hasmonaean rule.

Bar told Live Science that the coins themselves are of a fairly common type, but finding a large cache is much more of a rarity. The Hasmonaean deposit could have come to be for a number of reasons, including having been hidden in the walls for safekeeping, serving as an offering made during a new building project, or even been part of some sort of retail site along a well-traveled road to the Hasmonaean fort (the coins were located in what was believed a food preparation area).

“All students and excavators volunteering in the excavation,” Bar said about one of the largest collections of coins every discovered in Israel, “were very excited to find such a Hasmonaean cache.”

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