A Rare 2,000 Years Old Collection of Coins Discovered in Mohenjo Daro
Tauheed Ahmad Nawaz
A Rare 2,000-Year-Old Collection of Coins Discovered in Mohenjo Daro. Just imagine having a rare piece of coins in your hands—something that has endured for millennia and tells the narrative of ancient civilizations. Archaeologists in Pakistan uncovered a wonderfully rare collection of 2000-year-old coins in the remnants of a Buddhist shrine built at the famous site of Mohenjo Daro, a site dating back to around 2600 BC in southeast Pakistan. The copper coins found are estimated to date back to the Kushan Empire.
Today, the Buddhist monastery that produced these coins is located inside the enormous ruins of Mohenjo Daro. A team lead by veteran archeologist Sheikh Javed Ali Sindhi participated in the excavations when a wall collapsed at Mohenjo Daro, where they discovered a rare trove of coins. The copper on the coins tarnishes when exposed to air; therefore, the coins have turned greenish.
The coins have gathered into a circular pile weighing approximately 5.5 kg during decades of burial, yet some have been discovered separately. Mohenjo Daro was formerly the greatest settlement of the Indus Valley Civilization, but it was abandoned about 1700 BC, along with the other settlements. Historians still do not know what caused the huge civilization to die. These coins are the first to be found from the stupa’s ruins since 1931, when British archaeologist Ernest Mackay discovered over 1,000 copper coins. Other coins were unearthed in the stupa throughout the 1920s.
Just imagine having a rare piece of coin in your hands—something that has endured for millennia and tells the narrative of ancient civilizations.The copper coins found are estimated to date back to the Kushan Empire.A Rare 2,000-Year-Old Collection of Coins Discovered in Mohenjo Daro
