YAVNE, Israel — A group of teens in Israel made an amazing discovery.
The teens were volunteering at an excavation in central Israel that is going to be developed for a new neighborhood.
“I dug in the ground. And when I excavated the soil, saw what looked like very thin leaves. When I looked again I saw these were gold coins. It was really exciting to find such a special and ancient treasure,” Oz Cohen, one of the teens who found the treasure, told Reuters.
The 425 coins dated back to the ninth century and were found in an area where workshops were set up hundreds of years ago. There were full gold dinars as well as 270 smaller gold pieces that turned out to be dinars that were cut as “small change,” according to the BBC.
They weighed about 30 ounces and were worth a large sum when they were buried in a jar.
“The person who buried this treasure 1,100 years ago must have expected to retrieve it, and even secured the vessel with a nail so that it would not move,” excavation directors Liat Nadav-Ziv and Elie Haddad of the Israel Antiquities Authority, said in a statement, according to the BBC.
This isn’t the first large amount of gold coins that have been discovered over the past few years.
In 2015, amateur divers found 2,000 coins near the ancient port of Caesarea that dated to the 10th and 11th centuries, The Associated Press reported.