Lol, "Petra Drachm". I love how normal media completely screws up anything numismatic. Lets see, Petra was a city in a different civilization, not Jewish, and had nothing to do with coin denominations. They might have meant tetradrachm. 9 of them would not have bought a house, they would have fed a family for a month or so. They are Bar Kochba coins, scarce but not really rare. Edit: As far aas I know, all Bar Kochba coins were overstruck on Roman coins since they had no silver supply of their own. There are some really neat overstrikes since the coins weren't minted terribly well, you can frequently see the undertype. It seems they went out of their way to overstrike older "Judea Capta" coins that the Romans issued to celebrate the capture of Israel in the first Jewish uprising, which would make sense.
Well, I believe the coins in that article were actually found in Israel, and they often used foreign minted currency for the Temple Taxes and such. Your right that Petra is another civilizational that is in Jordan, and very very fascinating to read and learn about in its own right, with incredible ruins. Ruben
Temple taxes were only payable in half shekels of Tyre, no other coins. You could not even pay a shekel for two people, it had to be two half shekels for two people. This is the reason for money changers outside the temple to get the correct coinage to pay the tax. You are right that Petra is fascinating, but I think the reporter just heard tetradrachm and wrote Petra drachm incorrectly.
BTW - your 100% correct about the 1/2 Sheckle. It was used for Census purposes as well, so it was essential that it had to be a half sheckle, which actually has me thinking about the origins of coinage. The Half Sheckle dates back even before the Temple period and supposedly coins were only used at about 700 BCE. Judea was already centuries old by that time, so they much have used something other than a clump of metal. Ruben
Most early coin denominations were inherited from other units of value. I never read about it but I am sure a shekel was some other type of value, maybe metal maybe goods. The silver shekel got named as a stand in for that ancient value. The Romans were actually quite lenient with the Jews concerning shekels. Tyre stopped coining them around 100BC and they were becoming too scarce for the temple to use, so the Romans allowed them to be struck in Jerusalem specifically so the temple tax could efficiently be collected.
http://www.acsearch.info/search.html?search=similar:32338&view_mode=1#0 Those interested in that type coin might find the above link helpful (including large photos). I do find it interesting that the weight given for the new find is lower than these tend to be opening the possibility that the new ones did not spend all of the last 2000 years under that rock. Of course when you are overstriking older coins, weight standards may not be tightly enforced and I don't know the acceptable range here.
Unkind thought: If the reportage on all news stories is as accurate as that we see regarding numismatic items, we might be better educated making it up ourselves. Again, perhaps a handful of these would buy a house - not a big house, not a nice house but a dirt floor and a roof.
Yeah I thought of that, that maybe they would buy a hovel. It is still misleading though, no? I mean, if you report in 1,000 years that $8,000 could buy a house in 2010 is that untrue? No, you can buy a small house in parts of this country for that, but is that really what people think of as a house? Even if it were technically correct, it is not a correct impression in most peoples minds. I still say it would feed a "middle class" family for a month is a more true idea of 9 of thier's worth.
The concept of what an ancient coin was worth 'back then' is often asked and rarely answered to the satisfaction of the one who asked. I have offended people by being unable to provide the exchange rate they were seeking. I recall a high school Latin group publishing a newspaper wanting to know how much to print on it as a price but even the smallest Roman denomination seemed too much. We can provide a statistic like a denarius was a day's pay for a soldier so that makes a denarius between $40 and $100 depending on whose soldier and when you asked. I believe the current private E-1 (as low as you go) makes about $48 a day. I have never even thought how much it would cost to buy a house or, worse, land even if talking about a culture where land could be sold. In 443 AD Rome paid the Huns 120 Roman pounds of gold to keep them from being a problem ("foreign aid"). That works out to 150,000 solidi which of the most common variety currently sells for under $1000 each but lets just take it as 150 million dollars which, by modern foreign aid standards, made the Huns a real bargain.
Or they may have actually used lumps of metal. The Sheckel was not just a denomination, it was actually a specific unit of weight. So a half sheckel would be a lump of silver of half that amount of weight.
It is pretty clear from ancient writings from that period that it wasn't silver nuggets. There were laws pertaining to the purity and size of the silver. If not coins, it was a standard form or weight, and both the Juedian and Israel Monarchy put their seal on accepted currencies for the puposes of the Census and other business transactions.
Agreed Doug. It is very hard to quantify exchange rates, even though many ask. How I came up with my estimation was the fact that a denarius was a day's pay for a soldier, these coins were usually coined onto Roman denari, making the denomination a denarius not a tetradrachm, a roman soldier was a close approximation for modern societies' idea of middle class, and 9/30th of a months wages is not an unreasonable sum for food considering food used to be a higher cost relative to budgets than they are today. Look 100 years ago and see what percentage of budgets went to food, it was much higher before modern agricultural techniques. Also, I have seen prices of food in Roman Italy at the time, (Pompeii), and 9 denari for a family would not have been extravagent eating for a month. Anyway, just wanted to explain to everyone where my estimate came from, as I have a bad habit of doing all of that in my head from various sources. Here is a source I found giving some prices at various times in history: http://www.ancientcoins.biz/pages/economy/
