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Un trésor considérable et perdu : le trésor d’Alexandres de Gaza
Bauzou, Thomas
Thevenin, Gaëlle
2019
Abstract
In June 2013 was discovered the first part of a big hoard in Gaza, composed of hundreds of Alexander tetradrachmas, spread over the sand offshore. Some of these coins were bought by a private collector, who gave us the opportunity to examine a few of them the same year. The second part of this hoard was extracted from the sea in 2017, and divided between different families in Gaza. The total quantity of coins rises about 5000 to 8000 coins, including decadrachmas, most of them sent to international antique dealers, without any chance to recover. Since April, some of these coins appeared on antique dealers’ website, while in the same time, the customs of Israël caught a Palestinian from Gaza with some of these coins. These events show that the hoard is going to disappear from the scientific view, without having been studied or even noticed. Questions are numerous about this hoard: how reliable are the informations that were given about this hoard? How to study such a hoard, knowing most of the coins are now send abroad and so, lost for science? In the same time, is that reasonable to voluntarily forget this discovery, in a part of the world where these informations are both rare and crucial? This hoard bring together several difficulties: the large number of coins, the scattering and the sale of the tetradrachmas abroad, the difficulty to access the territory, and finally the documentary watch online, the only way to recover the informations of a small part of the coins. Some of them have been noticed, allowing us to elaborate a date of loss, and a sample of the mint that stroke some of the coins.
Publisher
EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste
Source
Thomas Bauzou, Gaëlle Thevenin, "Un trésor considérable et perdu : le trésor d’Alexandres de Gaza", in: Bruno Callegher (Edited by), “Too Big to Study? Troppo grandi da studiare?”, Trieste, EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2019, pp. 23-44
Languages
fr
Rights
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internazionale
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