Out of Africa (http://www.smh.com.au/national/out-of-africa-20130909-2tes7.html)
Quote from: 'JeffH' pid='28252' dateline='1379188338'Out of Africa (http://www.smh.com.au/national/out-of-africa-20130909-2tes7.html)
Very interesting
A great story. Ah to be so fortunate to find something like that.
A great story. Ah to be so fortunate to find something like that.
Finally! Pictures of the actual coins. Back when this story first aired some months ago and was mentioned on this forum (http://www.australian-coins.net/showthread.php?tid=1134) and on others, the only pics shown were of other Kilwa coins (http://www.zeno.ru/showgallery.php?cat=1383), not the actual ones found. And yes, it looks like they actually are Kilwa coins, and not mis-identified Indonesian Sultanates coins. Here are the pics (http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/collection/database/search_tags.php?tag=kilwa) on the Powerhouse Museum website.
What we don't know is what treatment or cleaning these coins received, wither by the Museum curators, one of the experts viewing the coins or by the original finder. These coins look far too clean to have been buried on a beach for 700 years.
Still, my earlier conclusion remains: no further numismatic finds on the island, plus no finding of definitively datable archaeological evidence, means that these coins are still not "history-changing" artefacts.
Quote from: 'Sapyx' pid='28343' dateline='1379248873'these coins are still not "history-changing" artefacts.
I thought that was drawing a rather long bow as well. There's absolutely no way to know whether they ended up there when first circulated, or centuries later when some poor numismatist dropped his collection overboard in a storm. ;)
They could even have been dropped there on the beach a few days or weeks earlier by some WWII serviceman who had souvenired them while stopping off in Zanzibar. A scenario, given the condition of the coins and the description of the circumstances of the finding, that seems much more believable to me than a lost hoard from lost mediaeval Islamic mariners.
I am not sure that the people involved are seriously considering all the possibilities.
Keep coming up with theories -unfortunately we probably don't have enough information to start discounting the wrong ones but it is interesting to speculate.
"When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." -Sherlock Holmes