2,500-year-old coin from Cyprus found on Israeli beach offers clues to biblical-era history
A 2,500-year-old coin minted in Cyprus that was recently discovered on an Israeli beach is giving researchers new evidence of trade and travel between the two lands during the biblical era.
The coin turned up last month on one of Ashdod’s beaches, in southern Israel. It was found by Ashdod beaches department deputy director Avi Chaprak, the Israel Ministry of Tourism said in a statement to The Christian Post.
Chaprak normally helps beachgoers find jewelry, keys and other lost belongings. He spotted the coin during one of those searches and recognized it as something different from the usual finds.
As per Israel’s antiquities law, he handed the object over for review by the Israel Antiquities Authority. Authority officials concluded that no coin like it had previously turned up in Israel.
Researchers date the coin’s minting to roughly the middle of the fifth century B.C., in Salamis, a city that sat on Cyprus’ eastern shoreline while the Persian Empire held authority over the island. It weighs roughly 11 grams and is a denomination called a siglos, commonly used in the Persian Empire.
Yanniv David Levy, a researcher and curator in the antiquities authority’s coin department, said the coin appeared to be silver at first glance. Testing showed it is actually made of a different metal plated with silver, a technique documented in other Cypriot coins from the period, since silver was scarce on the island at the time.
Levy said intact coins of this weight and denomination rarely survive from the Persian era. Most were sliced into fragments so they could serve as everyday currency, a practice documented mostly away from the coast, at sites further inland in Israel.
A complete coin from a coastal site, Levy added, is unusual on every count, and carries particular historical value.
The coin carries a ram lying down and facing left on one face. Its reverse shows only the ram’s head, turned the same direction, framed inside a sunken square stamp, accompanied by an upright laurel branch and three characters that appear to belong to Cyprus’ ancient syllabic writing system.
Evangeline Markou, who studies ancient Cypriot coinage as a researcher with the National Hellenic Research Foundation’s historical institute in Athens, said fifth-century Salamis coins made their way to harbors spanning the eastern Mediterranean world. Pieces that can be tied to an exact find spot are harder to come by, she said, and this one might shed new light on commercial contact and movement linking Cyprus with what was then the Land of Israel.
Levy said accurate reporting of the find spot and circumstances lets researchers identify the coin and use it as solid evidence of the trade and seafaring links that connected this region over two millennia ago.
Ashdod, where the coin surfaced, has served as a port on Israel’s Mediterranean coast for thousands of years and was, by the fifth century B.C., part of a Levant coastline under Persian control, the same empire that then held Cyprus.
In antiquity, Ashdod was counted among the five cities of the ancient Philistine pentapolis, a coastal alliance that predated Persian control of the region by centuries. Cyprus itself came under Persian rule in the late sixth century B.C., though local city-kingdoms such as Salamis kept minting their own coins, often stamped with local symbols rather than Persian imagery.
The siglos was the standard silver denomination of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, used alongside the gold daric, and both circulated widely throughout the empire’s territories in the fifth century B.C.
Chaprak received a certificate of appreciation from the antiquities authority for reporting the coin. The coin felt to him like something belonging to a shared heritage, he said, which is why he delivered it right away.
"If through this act I contributed another small piece towards the research and history of the Land of Israel, then that is a great honor for me," he said.
