Archaeologists in Jerusalem have discovered a rare, miniature gold coin that depicts the Egyptian queen Berenice II and dates to the reign of her husband, the third ruler of the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt.
The Ptolemies were a Macedonian royal dynasty founded by one of Alexander the Great’s generals, Ptolemy I Soter, during Egypt’s Hellenistic period (circa 323 to 30 B.C.).
The coin was likely minted in Alexandria 2,270 years ago, according to the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), which made the find in Jerusalem. It may have been part of a collection of coins that were gifted to soldiers returning from the Third Syrian War (246 to 241 B.C.), a conflict between the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt and the Seleucid Empire of Syria.
“It’s a gorgeous coin,” Robert Kool, head of numismatics at the IAA, said in a video describing the discovery. “We [have] only found 17 of these coins over the past 100 years.”
Of those coins, this one is the first to have been found outside Egypt and in organized excavations. It was unearthed in the City of David, an archaeological site in East Jerusalem that is considered the city’s ancient settlement core.
Rivka Langler, who has been excavating an area of the site called the Givati Parking Lot for two years, spotted the coin while sifting through soil. “I was sifting the excavation soil when suddenly I saw something shiny,” Langler said in a statement. “At first, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, but within seconds I was running excitedly through the excavation site.”
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One side of the coin shows a portrait of Queen Berenice II wearing a tiara, a veil and a necklace. The other side, which depicts a cornucopia and two stars, bears the ancient Greek inscription “Basileisses,” which means “of the Queen.”
Berenice II was the wife and consort of Ptolemy III, who ruled in Egypt between 246 and 221 B.C. — but the inscription on the coin suggests Berenice may have been a ruler in her own right, according to the statement.
“She was a queen of an area which was called Kirinyaka, today in eastern Libya,” Kool explained in the video. “When she married her cousin Ptolemy III, this area became part of this large and very, very important and rich Hellenistic kingdom. When her husband, Ptolemy III, invaded Syria, she took over as the regent of Egypt.”
Queens of the Ptolemaic dynasty occasionally appeared on coins, with one famous example being Cleopatra VII (known simply as Cleopatra), the daughter of Ptolemy XII. But the new discovery still stands out as one of the oldest such coins and suggests Queen Berenice II had great political power or influence, according to the statement.
It’s unclear how the coin ended up in Jerusalem, but its discovery there indicates that the ancient city was rapidly recovering from the destruction of the First Temple in 586 or 587 B.C., when the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II laid siege to Jerusalem.
“Until now, the prevailing scholarly view was that [after the siege] Jerusalem was a small, marginal, resource-poor town,” Yiftah Shalev, an archaeologist with the IAA who co-led the excavations, said in the statement.
However, “Jerusalem seems to have begun recovering already during the Persian period [586 to 333 B.C.] and grew stronger under Ptolemaic rule,” Shalev said. “Jerusalem in the centuries after the destruction of the First Temple was not desolate and isolated, but rather a city in the process of renewal, reestablishing ties with the dominant political, economic, and cultural centers of the period.”
The elite in Jerusalem likely shared ties with the ruling elite in Egypt, Yuval Gadot, a professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv University and the excavation director, said in the video. “The golden coin we found here … tells us that Jerusalem was an important city,” he said.