By: Wesley Zhao

A soldier kneels in his home, digging in an earthly corner of its and places a small jug filled with his life savings. He puts his scores of gold coins, called drains and covers it with dirt. But something happens to him which we will never find out. All we know is that he will never get back his hoard of money, and it will get found by people in 2024.

That is only one theory of what happed to the gold coins, found in Notion, a ruin in Turkey. Christopher Ratté conjured up these scenarios at the University of Michigan to account of their finds. He and his team unearthed these coins from an ancient-city-state in Turkey–– called Notion–– from beneath a courtyard of a house.

This discovery is very important for archaeological research, as Andrew Meadows, an archaeologist at Oxford, said there were no other hoard of coins to be in Asia Minor. He also said, “The archaeological context for the hoard will help us fine-tune the chronology of Achaemenid gold coinage.” (New York Times,2024).

Another scenario is that during the Peloponnesian War, there was a naval battle off the coast of Notion and that once Athens lost it, it was buried there.

Notion drains are stamped on the front with a likeness of a Persian king kneeling in a long tunic. In his left hand is a bow and in his right is a long spear, The backs of the coins are blank, except for a punch mark. Right now, it is being stored at the Ephesus Archaeological Museum. A piece of Athenian pottery was also recovered during that dig.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/02/science/archaeology-turkey-daric.html