OCR Text |
Show Historians Stirred by Find of Ancient Coins Coins that shed new light on an obscure period of Jewish history have been discovered in a private collection in Jerusalem. The coins are of the Fifth century, B. C, which Is 300 years older than any Jewish coins heretofore known. The money known to have been regularly reg-ularly used in ancient Palestine was foreign money, chiefly coins of nations na-tions which in turn dominated the Hebrew country. It has been supposed sup-posed that the Jews were not allowed al-lowed to issue their own coinage until a Syrian king granted that liberty lib-erty about 130 B. C. The discovery shows that after the Persians swept the Babylonians from power and allowed the exiled Jews to return to Jerusalem, the Persian king granted autonomy. The Jerusalem coins are said to match a small silver coin which for the last 150 years has been in the British museum. It bears an inscription inscrip-tion of three Aramic letters, which it is said always have been wrongly interpreted by scholars and therefore the significance of the coin was not completely understood. He reads the letters as "Yehud," which was at one time the official name of the province of Judea. The coins bear the engraving en-graving of an owl, under which appear ap-pear the three letters in the old Phoenician Hebrew script. |