ancient culture rare 600kg haul of ancient coins found

CONSTRUCTION workers have found 600 kilos of ancient Roman coins while carrying out routine work on water pipes in southern Spain.

“It is a unique collection and there are very few similar cases,” Ana Navarro, head of Seville’s Archeology Museum which is looking after the find, told a news conference.

Dating back to the late third and early fourth centuries, the bronze coins were found Wednesday inside 19 Roman amphoras, a type of jar, in the town of Tomares near Seville.

Navarro declined to give a precise estimate for the value of the haul, saying only that the coins were worth “certainly several million euros”.

The coins are stamped with the inscriptions of emperors Maximian and Constantine, and they appeared not to have been in circulation as they show little evidence of wear and tear.

It is thought they were intended pay the army or civil servants.

“The majority were newly minted and some of them probably were bathed in silver, not just bronze,” said Navarro.

“I could not give you an economic value, because the value they really have is historical and you can’t calculate that.”

Local officials have suspended the work on the water pipes and plan to carry out an archaeological excavation on the site.

The Romans conquered the Iberian Peninsula in 218BC, ruling until the early 5th century when they were ousted by the Visigoths.

A cache of coins from the reign of Æthelred the Unready, over a thousand years ago, has been discovered in a farm just northeast of London. It might be one of the biggest such caches ever found.

Aylesbury, a suburb of London that’s received a boom in population overspill from the capital in recent decades, might not be exactly the place you’d expect to find ancient treasures; it’d be like looking for treasure in Weehawken, or Orange County. But a group of “metal detectorists,” as they call themselves, from a larger group called the Weekend Wanderers Detecting Club, stumbled on a massive cache of thousand-year-old coins in a farm there.

The cache itself is enormous, one of the biggest in history, consists of 5,251 silver coins, which were buried in a lead box in a farmer’s field. The coins date from around the year 1000, either during the reign of Æthelred the Unready or possibly Cnut the Great. They appear to have been buried shortly after manufacture, given their near-perfect quality, and have remained undisturbed ever since.

“But how much are they worth???” you ask. The coins would have been worth a crazy amount at the time they were made; even a single coin would have been significant. These days, they’re estimated to be worth about £1 million, which is around $1.5 million in United States dollars. Because the coins are so old, they’ll be auctioned off to a prestigious museum, by law, but the proceeds will be split evenly between the group that discovered them and the farmer who owns the land. That’s one way to make it as a suburban farmer in 2015!