Khirbet Badd 'Isa

Someone hid a hundred and forty-seven coins in a building here, and the newest one was struck four years before the revolt that emptied the village.

historicalculture

Two coin hoards turned up inside two separate buildings on this hill. One held forty-eight bronze coins, a jumble of old and new, running from the first century BCE up to the years of the Bar Kokhba Revolt. The other held a hundred and forty-seven, with coins of Herod, Agrippa, Vespasian, Trajan and Hadrian in it. The latest piece in that second hoard dates to the year one hundred twenty-eight. Four years later the Bar Kokhba Revolt began. When it failed, the village was emptied. Nobody came back for the money. In all, archaeologists pulled three hundred sixty-five coins out of the site, and the run tells the story on its own. Ptolemaic and Seleucid pieces at the bottom. Hasmonean issues above them. Then coins from Year Two of the First Jewish Revolt, followed by Roman coins of Vespasian from the Iudaea Capta series, minted to advertise the conquest.

This is the first of 2 parts. The rest runs about 2 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.

What this was written from
The second hoard contained 147 bronze coins, including issues of Herod, Agrippa, Vespasian, Trajan, and Hadrian; the latest pieces date to 128 CE.

Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Nearby, on the same roads

  • Tel Hadid 5.9 mi Two clay tablets found on this hill record business deals from 698 and 664 BCE, and the names on them belong to people deported here from Mesopotamia.
  • Horvat Mazad 7.6 mi On one small hill west of Jerusalem, a Jewish ritual bath was later cut through by Muslim graves facing Mecca.
  • Qula 9.2 mi A defense tower still standing here was built by Crusader knights, out of stones taken from something older still.
  • Gibeon (ancient city) 10.1 mi The people of this hill town tricked Joshua into a peace treaty by pretending they lived far away.
  • Antipatris 14 mi The oldest winepresses ever found in the southern Levant sit beside an Egyptian governor's house at Tel Afek.
  • Church of the Holy Sepulchre 15 mi A caliph prayed outside this church rather than inside, so nobody could later claim it as a mosque.