INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Gold coins and an earring uncovered at an excavation site in Israel's Caesarea
possibly left and never recovered as Crusaders conquered the area 900 years ago.The Israel Antiquities Authority announced the find on
Monday of a small bronze pot holding 24 gold coins and the earring.According to the authority, it was found between two stones in the side
of a well in a house in a neighbourhood that dates back some 900 years, during the Abbasid and Fatimid periods.The directors of the
excavation, the IAA's Peter Gendelman and Mohammed Hatar, said the coins in the cache date to the end of the 11th century.That makes it
possible "to link the treasure to the Crusader conquest of the city in the year 1101, one of the most dramatic events in the medieval
history of the city", an IAA statement said."According to contemporary written sources, most of the inhabitants of Caesarea were massacred
by the army of Baldwin I (1100-1118), king of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem," it added."It is reasonable to assume that the treasure's
owner and his family perished in the massacre or were sold into slavery, and therefore were not able to retrieve their gold."IAA coin expert
Robert Kool said "one or two of these gold coins were the equivalent of the annual salary of a simple farmer, so it seems that whoever
deposited the cache was at least well-to-do or involved in commerce".Caesarea was constructed in the first century BC by King Herod at a
time that Judea was part of the Roman empire.(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by TheIndianSubcontinent staff and is
published from a syndicated feed.)
