Acting upon a tip-off, the provincial security directorate units carried out a raid on a minibus and seized three handwritten Hebrew manuscripts, nine coins and a small statue of a woman holding a water jug.The anti-smuggling unit of the Turkish security forces has been working hard lately. These objects were seized from a group of Syrians, which perhaps points to an origin in Syria.
The twos photographs provide limited information, so I can't say much about the objects. None of the books are open, so we can't tell anything about their content. The two on the right are bound codices and possibly the pages are made of paper or parchment. The book on the left looks to me as though the pages are made of metal and it is held together with metal binding rings. Some fake metal codices were recovered in Turkey in 2017. This looks like another metal codex, although I don't recall seeing any before that have a heavy embossed design on the front cover like this one.
I have nothing interesting to say about the statuette or the coins.
Let's keep an eye on this one. I have yet to see any genuine ancient artifacts come out of these Turkish anti-smuggling operations, but I suppose there could always be a first time.
For other similar stories coming out of Turkey, see here and follow the many links. For my definitive (for now) evaluation of what we know about the metal codices recovered from Jordan and elsewhere, see here and links.
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