By: Julia Chew

An ancient hoard of Persian coins offers insights into the political landscape in Turkey around the time of the Peloponnesian War.

It is the late fifth century B.C. and a mercenary soldier kneels in his modest quarters, digging a hole in the earthen floor. He places a small jug called an olpe in the hole for safekeeping and covers it with dirt. In the olpe are his savings — scores of gold coins, known as darics, each one equal to a month’s pay.

But something happens to the soldier, and he never retrieves his collection, which remains untouched for the next 2,400 years.

Christopher Ratté, an archaeologist at the University of Michigan, and his research team recently unearthed from the ruins of Notion, an ancient city-state in modern-day Turkey. While digging beneath the courtyard of a house dating to the third century B.C., the excavators found the remains of an earlier dwelling. “The coins were buried in a corner of the older building,” Dr. Ratté said. “We weren’t actually looking for a pot of gold.”

Darics were chiefly used to pay soldiers. Andrew Meadows, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford who was not involved in the project, said he did not know of any collection of this type to turn up in Asia Minor. “This is a find of the highest importance,” he said. “The archaeological context for the hoard will help us fine-tune the chronology of Achaemenid gold coinage.”