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Continuing excavations at an ancient Greek city in western Turkey have unearthed artifacts and archaeological remains dating back to the 5th century BC, including a jar filled with an untold number of valuable gold coins that had been hidden for more than 2,000 years.
Researchers discovered the treasure at Notion, an 80-acre fortified city that was inhabited from the 6th century B.C. to the 1st century A.D. The treasure, found buried (likely intentionally) beneath the floor of a 5th-century B.C. courtyard house, may tell the story of an ancient mercenary during that time of conflict, according to a news release from the University of Michigan.
“It is very rare for such a valuable find to be discovered in a controlled archaeological dig,” excavation leader Dr. Christopher Ratté, professor of ancient Mediterranean art and archaeology at the University of Michigan and director of the Notion Archaeological Project, said in a press release.
“No one would bury a hoard of coins, especially precious metals, without the intention of retrieving them. Therefore, only the greatest misfortune can explain the preservation of such a treasure.”
The site contains typical features of an ancient Greek city, such as a theater, temples, townhouses, and a marketplace. Notion lay largely untouched and unexplored for thousands of years until about a decade ago, when Ratté and a team of researchers began the process of aerially surveying and mapping the visible remains of the city, which they found to date to the Hellenistic period (323 BCE to 30 BCE).
But when researchers began excavations in 2022, aiming to examine the hidden remains above ground, they made a tantalizing discovery: Underneath the foundations of a large Hellenistic-era courtyard townhouse were the remains of an older house, whose walls were covered in pottery sherds dating to the fifth century B.C., according to the report. The researchers later found a hoard of coins buried beneath the floor of the older house.
The works shed light not only on the period from the time of Alexander the Great to the Roman Empire, but also on the period hundreds of years earlier, when tensions were high between the Greek civilization and the Persian Empire.
Persian for soldier darics
The newly found coins date from the Persian Empire (6th century BCE to around 330 BCE) and are known as Persian darics because of the kneeling archer on the obverse of the coin, which depicts King Darius of Persia. Like most ancient coins from the 6th to 4th centuries BCE, the coin is not dated, posing a challenge for researchers trying to determine when it was produced, said Dr. Peter van Alfen, chief curator of the American Numismatic Association, who was not involved in the excavation.
“Several huge daric hoards encompassing thousands of coins have been found in the past, but these were not found by archaeologists, so the coins were scattered and the context of the treasure was lost forever,” van Alfen said in an email. “It is rare that this daric hoard was found in a controlled archaeological excavation. … The (archaeological) context of this hoard can provide a definitive dating peg for certain types of daric.”
Ratté said the coins have had minor stylistic changes over the roughly 200 years they were produced, which researchers are trying to put in chronological order. Discovering the coins with external dating evidence allows scientists to understand why the coin had such high intrinsic value for that time.
It’s unclear exactly what the precious coin was used for — one guess is that it was a way to pay mercenaries, van Alfen said. One gold coin was equivalent to a month’s wages for a mercenary, according to the University of Michigan. Silver coins were used more for everyday expenses, such as going to the store. These were known as Persian silver sigloi, and 20 were worth one gold coin.
“The fact that this treasure was found in a house suggests that, whatever the intended purpose of the daric makers, in this case they were used to store wealth,” van Alfen said. Because of the high value of gold coins, “it was much more efficient to store wealth in gold coins rather than silver,” he added.
As for why the owner didn’t return to claim the gold, Ratté suggested that it could be indicative of Notion’s place as a frontier between Greek civilization and the Persian Empire during centuries of conflict. He suggested that several scenarios could have led to the coins being abandoned, one of which was that in 427 BC, an Athenian general attacked and massacred a group of mercenaries for the Persians.
He added that a similar conflict took place in the late 5th century BC, when the Spartan navy defeated the Athenians in a battle and they were forced to evacuate the city.
Van Alfen also said it was possible that the treasure belonged to a wealthy citizen who hoped to one day live like a king, as did the extremely wealthy Pythius (an ancient Greek architect) who had around 4 million darics in his coffers, according to Herodotus.
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