At the beginning of the meeting, which ran 45 minutes over the time allocated to it, Netanyahu gave Bush an ancient coin discovered in Jerusalem that dates from the third year of the great Judean revolt against the Romans in the first century CE. The coin bears Hebrew writing, signaling that the Jewish people's connection to Jerusalem has lasted thousands of years.This article says that this was from the first Jewish revolt against Rome (66-70 CE), but I know of no Jewish coins that dated themselves to this revolt. I suspect that it was a coin from the Bar Kokhba revolt in 132-135 CE.
Do any numismatists out there want to comment?
UPDATE: Reader Simon Montagu e-mails:
The report at http://www.nrg.co.il/online/1/ART1/682/151.html (Hebrewsite) quotes the inscription on the coin: שקל ישראל שנה ג' (למרד)Thanks for the correction.
ירושלים הקדושה
There are indeed such coins from the Great Revolt and I found one illustrated online at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Great_Revolt_coin.jpg
(I'm not a numismatist, but I have Ya'akov Meshorer's catalogue of
Jewish coins of the second temple period)
UPDATE (12 January): Carla Sulzbach e-mails with a website on coins of the Jewish War here.
