The other two are still in the wind - likely looted, he said. One sits in the British Museum in London. Wertsch said that beside the one that will be returned to Israel, there are only three others of its kind. The DA’s office said it knows of just two. This shekel retains such cultural - and monetary - value because there are so few. “You can tell what someone from 1,000 years ago looked like from a coin.” “A lot of the things we know about ancient civilizations - the things that are left to tell us about them - are from the coins they issued,” David Stone, a coin cataloger for Heritage Auctions, told The Post. pennies or octagonal coins from 1900, forged with silver from the Cripple Creek mining district.Īncient currencies also would be marketed to attendees, The Post noted. They teased the valuables for sale - including early U.S. It’s unclear if Israeli or British authorities have taken anyone into custody.īack in the summer of 2017, multiple media outlets, including The Denver Post, previewed the American Numismatic Association’s World’s Fair of Money, which included the ancient coins auction. “Shortly before the auction was to begin, Homeland Security contacted us about the coin, and we fully cooperated by turning it over and supplying them with all the requested information,” Sam Spiegel, Heritage Auctions’ Director of International Numismatics, said in the statement. The auction house, which is based in Dallas but has offices throughout Europe and Asia, then imported the coin to the U.S.
Once we received the coin from the consignor, we applied for and were granted a U.K. Heritage Auctions told The Post in an email that “a client in London represented to us that he inherited this coin from his father and signed an agreement affirming he had clear title to the coin.
The silver artifact wasn’t on a watch list and the auction house didn’t have any reason to believe it to be stolen, the federal agent said. “This sounds like the story of a grave robber,” Wertsch said, citing what he was told by an expert. But recently, he told authorities that he realized he had an extremely valuable treasure on his hands. The seller told investigators that he bought several unwashed coins many years earlier and never really looked at them, Wertsch said. “There were many reasons to believe that the coin was not his,” Wertsch said. Over the next two decades, the shekel circulated within the illicit antiquities market, until it was smuggled from Israel to Jordan - and finally to London, investigators say.įrom there, an unnamed person in 2017 used false provenance papers to export the prized object to the United States, where it was put up for sale at Heritage Auctions’ World Coins & Ancient Coins Signature Auction in Denver, authorities said. The coin, with an estimated value of $1 million, is being returned to Israel. Year Four Quarter Shekel seized in Denver in 2017. The Israeli Antiquities Authority learned in 2002 that the shekel had been looted in the Ella Valley, a long, shallow swath of land outside Jerusalem believed to be the site of the famous David-versus-Goliath fight, according to the Manhattan DA’s office. These were expensive coins to produce, the agent said, and thus a rarity.
69 during the fourth year of fighting, was used less as currency and more for propaganda reasons: “To show that the Jewish people were a people,” said Greg Wertsch, a special agent with Homeland Security Investigations in Denver. The conflict ended only after the legendary siege and mass suicide atop Masada, where a small group of Jewish rebels killed themselves to avoid being taken by the Romans. 66, living under Roman rule, launched what became known as the “ Great Revolt.”Īs many as 1 million Jews were killed during the bitter feud, which included the Romans sacking the sacred temple in Jerusalem. His office’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit took over the case this year after agents from Homeland Security Investigations in 2017 seized the coin in Denver. “We are honored to return the Quarter Shekel, an exceedingly rare coin that has immense cultural value,” Manhattan District Attorney Alvin L. The shekel was officially handed over to Israeli officials Monday during a repatriation ceremony in New York City, the result of a five-year global investigation that sent authorities on an ancient coin hunt from the Mile High City to Jerusalem. But in 2017, this dime-sized relic appeared for sale at a coin show inside the Colorado Convention Center in downtown Denver. Israel doesn’t have a single one of these coins in its museums. One night two decades ago, in a valley outside Jerusalem, a group of looters dug up a startling piece of ancient Jewish history: A silver quarter shekel minted nearly 2,000 years ago at the Temple Mount, one of Judaism’s holiest sites. Digital Replica Edition Home Page Close Menu
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