Thursday, June 18, 2015

A Canaanite coin? No.

CONFUSION: Ancient Coin Of The Canaanite Realm (Steve Lipman, The Jewish Week).
This coin probably was not worth very much when it was minted three millennia ago, but it’s priceless to contemporary historians and archaeologists.

Discovered last year at a cave near Kibbutz Lahav in southern Israel, it is a product of Egyptians who ran an administrative center there about 3,400 years ago, when Canaan was ruled by Egypt; it recently went on display at the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem.

[...]
There weren't any coins 3,400 years ago; they weren't invented for close to another millennium. This is a scarab seal, a typically ancient Egyptian artifact. If you turned it over you would see a representation of the back of a scarab beetle. Ynet News has a recent article on the Tel Halif cave discoveries here. If you scroll down to the fourth photo, you will see the same scarab on the middle right, along with other scarabs and related finds.