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Middle schooler finds coin from Troy in Berlin
- e-dant 7mo agoRarely do I think "that would make great poem"
- lordleft 7mo agoI knew vaguely that Troy had many layers of settlement, but I didn't realize that Troy had an extensive life in antiquity that extended into the classical Greek age (Post-Bronze Age) and Early Roman Age. It's funny to think of Roman and Greek Tourists visiting Troy VIII in 300 BC.
- lamasery 7mo agoI wonder if there were street vendors selling little replicas of the wooden horse.
- kirubakaran 7mo agoWhen I visited Troy, the museum's trojan horse replica said "Under Construction". Apparently it had been that way for months and months, which was pretty funny considering the original took only 3 days.
- bombcar 7mo ago"Be careful building that thing! It might go off!"
- redsocksfan45 7mo ago[dead]
- schoen 7mo agoI had the same problem during my visit. It seems we can't build bridges, railroads, or Trojan horses nearly as fast as earlier generations could.
- satvikpendem 7mo agoYou might be interested in this, a list by Stripe's founder. https://patrickcollison.com/fast https://patrickcollison.com/fast
- exitb 7mo agoWas there anything resembling tourism in 300 BC?
- arethuza 7mo ago"The final layers (Troy VIII–IX) were Greek and Roman cities which served as tourist attractions and religious centers because of their link to mythic tradition." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy
- gostsamo 7mo agono, but in first century bc and after that the roman world was connected enough that rich young romans were doing their version of the grand tour. Cesar managed to be kidnapped by pirates doing something like that, if I remember it correctly.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- Gormo 7mo ago> no, but in first century bc and after that the roman world was connected enough that rich young romans were doing their version of the grand tour. So "yes", then.
- alephnerd 7mo agoDon't underestimate ancient globalization. Heck, Inuit had Chinese bronze artifacts [0] well before European contact (basically 4,000 miles). [0] - https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/archive/releases/2016/Q2/old-world-metals-were-traded-on-alaska-coast-several-hundred-years-before-contact-with-europeans.html https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/archive/releases/2016/Q2/old...
- nephihaha 7mo agoTrade =/= globalisation.
- wahern 7mo agoIIRC, the Inuit reached North America from the West right about the time the Vikings reached it from the East, but they managed to colonize and stay, displacing the native inhabitants and eventually spreading to Greenland, again displacing the natives. Their technological advantages were their kayaks and hunting strategies, so presumably the displacement was less violent.
- sidewndr46 7mo agoI read something about the Sphinx in Egypt suggesting that modern excavations came to the conclusion that at least one Ancient Egyptian dynasty probably excavated it trying to figure out the history of it as well
- Tuna-Fish 7mo agoThe oldest written text that definitely refers to it is the Dream Stele by Thutmose IV, which describes him having it dug free of sand. The monument was more than a thousand years old at that point. Young kings showing their piety by restoring old monuments was useful royal propaganda. This wasn't even the last time that the Sphinx was restored.
- ocschwar 7mo agoThe Pyramids have a recently noticed Tamil inscription from Indian tourists visiting 2000 years ago. And the Neo-Babylonian Empire had the first tourism minister taking care of a paleo-Babylonian site.
- rtkrni 7mo agoNo information about the kid who found it? Did he get some reward for finding it? Does it come from some archeological site around there or some collector just lost it there?
- adriand 7mo agoYeah I really want more information than "on a walk". Really? No digging whatsoever involved? Did they walk past an eroding riverbank or something? I'm so curious.
- zadikian 7mo agoThere's a link in the blog to another source saying he found it in a field that turned out to be an archeological site. A modern collector didn't lose it. https://greekreporter.com/2026/04/16/ancient-greek-coin-troy-discovered-berlin/ https://greekreporter.com/2026/04/16/ancient-greek-coin-troy...
- RyanOD 7mo agoDoes he get the coin back after the museum is done showing it?
- Tuna-Fish 7mo ago"Finders keepers" is a legal principle only common in common law countries. In most of the world, in no way could you be construed to own something just because you found it in the ground. In most civil law countries, everything always has a legal owner (usually reverting to the state when no other legal owner can be found), and if you just "find" something and take it, you have committed theft. In Germany, the antiquities law is clear that anything of significant historical value belongs to the state, with a monetary reward possible for the finder in some situations (and finding something and not reporting it is a crime). If an old coin is deemed to not be historically significant, it probably belongs to the landowner.
- Archelaos 7mo ago> If an old coin is deemed to not be historically significant, it probably belongs to the landowner. According to § 984 BGB, a historically insignificant find belongs to the finder and landowner in equal shares.[1] If the find is so important that it is considered a "cultural monument" (Kulturdenkmal), the law of the individual German state determines who owns it and whether or how much of a compensation is payed to the finder.[2] [1] https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/bgb/__984.html https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/bgb/__984.html (in German) [2] For details see https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schatzregal#Deutschland https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schatzregal#Deutschland (in German)
- cammasmith 7mo agoCan't even imagine what it's like to live in Europe. Just casually going on a walk and finding a coin that is over 2 millennia old. Just another Tuesday.
- SoftTalker 7mo agoYou can walk around the USA and find flint arrowheads ... not sure the Native Americans used coins as such.
- robot-wrangler 7mo agoYeah the wild thing about the southwest is the open-air museum aspect of it, not the layers on layers. For petroglyphs, the southwest has so many that date to the high middles ages (~1100 AD) you can stumble on them by accident as a hiker. AFAIK the oldest in the area are still thought to be these ones[0], about 9000 years ago. (Always controversial to date rocks I guess, but the oldest North American mummy should be easier and is about the same.[1]) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnemucca_Lake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnemucca_Lake [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_Cave_mummy#Dating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_Cave_mummy#Dating
- AlotOfReading 7mo agoThe southwest has plenty of layers on layers. Tucson is built on a Spanish fort, which is built on native villages on top of yet older native villages going back almost 4,000 years, as one example. For another example, most neighborhoods in eastern phoenix are built on top of old Hohokam villages, adjoining older basketmaker sites. The canals throughout the city often follow the old Hohokam canals. Fun fact, the Intel Chandler campus is on top of old hohokam suburbs of Pueblo de los muertos, which is buried under the modern suburbs.
- alephnerd 7mo agoThe Puebloan culture in the southwest during that time was basically a full fledged civilization. It's insane how underresearched such a culture is despite having built megastructures like within the Grand Chaco Canyon
- danans 7mo ago> Already in the 5th century BC, Herodotus reports about the ‘Hyperboreans’ (Folks from above the North Wind), and how they regularly visited the island of Delos Heh, some things never change.
- hecturchi 7mo agoAs a child I was walking down the street and kicked something by chance that sounded metallic. 150 year old coin, irrc. Just there on the asphalt next to the sidewalk. Unfortunately bronze, with trimmed edges, common mint and worth very little. But if you tell me someone just stumbles onto and old coin in the street just lime that, I pretty much believe it.
- SoftTalker 7mo agoWhen I was a teenager I was working at McDonalds and someone came in and paid for a meal using old US Silver Certificate bills. Some people just are careless and don't notice old or unusual things.
- bombcar 7mo agoI used to see those once or twice a year, now it's been a decade since I've seen even a $2 in the wild.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- genxy 7mo agoYou can get new $2 from your bank
- eszed 7mo agoAnd they're still a pain to spend, because too many people refuse to believe they're real money. Or else don't want to take them because there isn't a slot in their cash drawer. I inherited a couple of bundles from my dad last year (he made $2 bills his "thing", much like Woz, because he enjoyed arguing with cashiers), and exchanged them all at the bank for "real money".
- cxr 7mo agoI believe that you have run into difficulty with some person(s) not understanding that $2 bills are real money. I don't believe that they've been anywhere nearly as much of "a pain to spend" for you as you're stating. You're just gabbing.
- cachius 7mo agoOfficial German press statment: https://www.berlin.de/landesdenkmalamt/aktivitaeten/presse/2026/pressemitteilung.1657799.php https://www.berlin.de/landesdenkmalamt/aktivitaeten/presse/2...
- brcmthrowaway 7mo agoGermany was populated in antiquity?
- QuercusMax 7mo agoIs this a joke?
- lukan 7mo agoProbably just ignorance, but there actually was a gap in that time in some areas in germany. Close to my hometown are the remains of an old ancient fortress - that was build by mostly unknown people and abandoned at 400 b.c. and only 1000 years later there were settlements again. A bit rougher area, though. The flat area of Berlin on the other hand, had human settlement since 60 000 years.
- QuercusMax 7mo agoI don't think anyone requires every hectare to have been developed in order to consider an area inhabited. Neanderthals are named after the Neander valley (Thal) near Dusseldorf, so I think we can definitely say yes, that humans have lived in Germany since long before antiquity.
- lukan 7mo ago"that humans have lived in Germany since long before antiquity." Yes, but there were definitely whole areas not habited for quite some time .. likely reason, climate change! (It got colder at that time)
- tremon 7mo agoGermany was only populated in olden times. The present name for (most of) the region is Deutschland.
- traderj0e 7mo agoRomans referred to the region where they came into contact with villages across the Rhine as "Germania."
- mc32 7mo agoDid Schliemann pass through Berlin, maybe?
- moezd 7mo agoThat, or German soldiers and engineers and adventurers passing by in the 19th and early 20th century bringing home "a souvenir". It would be in character since the large sections of ancient Pergamon were also lifted and shifted to Berlin as well.
- brailsafe 7mo agoThis article https://www.dw.com/en/teen-discovers-first-ancient-greek-artifact-found-in-berlin/a-76833757 https://www.dw.com/en/teen-discovers-first-ancient-greek-art... posted by roelschroeven is much more informative than this AI slop. Link should be updated to this.
- BobbyTables2 7mo agoWhoever dropped that coin is going to be very upset!
- jb1991 7mo agoThat's addressed in the article: unlikely to be a collector who lost the coin. The coin was just one of many artifacts discovered in that area over the last 75 years.
- nickpinkston 7mo agoUnsure if this is the connection, but the guy who discovered Troy in the late 1800's (Heinrich Schliemann) actually brought Troy artifacts to a Berlin museum, which someone with more knowledge of Berlin than me may be able to draw more connections from. Per his Wikipedia: "In 1874 Schliemann published Troy and Its Remains. Schliemann at first offered his collections, which included Priam's Gold, to the Greek government, then the French, and finally the Russians. In 1881, his collections ended up in Berlin, housed first in the Ethnographic Museum, and then the Museum for Pre- and Early History, until the start of WWII. In 1939, all exhibits were packed and stored in the museum basement, then moved to the Prussian State Bank vault in January 1941. In 1941, the treasure was moved to the Flakturm located at the Berlin Zoological Garden, called the Zoo Tower. Dr. Wilhelm Unverzagt protected the three crates containing the Trojan gold when the Battle of Berlin commenced, right up until SMERSH forces took control of the tower on 1 May. On 26 May 1945, Soviet forces, led by Lt. Gen. Nikolai Antipenko, Andre Konstantinov, deputy head of the Arts Committee, Viktor Lazarev, and Serafim Druzhinin, took the three crates away on trucks. The crates were then flown to Moscow on 30 June 1945, and taken to the Pushkin Museum ten days later. In 1994, the museum admitted the collection was in their possession." From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Schliemann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Schliemann
- nephihaha 7mo agoBerlin has dozens of museums with classical artefacts, notably the Pergamon. It is highly likely that it was looted by the Red Army or even a German during the war.
- jb1991 7mo agoI've always wondered how something so old and in one place so long is just sitting on top of the soil so easily found. How did it go for such a long time not noticed?
- jjk166 7mo agoEarth erodes, fields are plowed, roots disturb the soil; if it's sitting on the surface now, it almost certainly was buried not long ago. It's the same reason paleontologists can go back to the same places every year and find new fossils, or farmers keep having to remove stones from their fields.
- agentifysh 7mo agoso how much is this coin worth ?
- tdiff 7mo agoI don't get why people capable of making complex bas-relief could not make the coin more or less round
- nemo 7mo agoIt is more or less round. While modern milled coining created nice neatly rounded coins, throughout the history of hammered coins they were very rarely anything like a perfectly rounded coin. They were creating these things in a mass production environment where they made tens of thousands (or more the Romans), quality control was focused on weight over all else. For silver coins and gold some issuers did often try to hold to higher aesthetic standards, there's some Roman/Sassanian/etc coins that are fairly nicely rounded (though often still a bit ragged on the edges from being hammered) but for bronzes they did rarely focused on this (the Ptolemaics did, some others did, most didn't care).
- ekaryotic 7mo agoDo you happen to know the reason the term for english is sasanach in irish language. i.e. is there a connection between sasanach and sassanian.
- nemo 7mo agoFairly sure it's just a coincidence, Sasanian refers to the dynasty started by Sasan, an ancient Persian king. Sassenach seems to have its roots in "Saxon".
- simonreiff 7mo agoAntiquity slop
- tsoukase 7mo agoMost probably the artifact was transferred there in modern times. Once I had found a 2nf century AD Roman coin while playing outside, worth about 200E. If they were transfered in their corresponding time, they would be burried many metres beneath earth surface.
- AlotOfReading 7mo agoBerlin specifically has a few meters of soil separating it from that period, but that's not always true. I've excavated millennia-old sites barely centimeters under the surface. Others are buried under meters of soil overnight. There's also natural processes moving things around in the soil (e.g. rabbits, freeze-thaw cycles), and human processes (e.g. tilling). I wouldn't jump immediately to modern collector, nor does the article.
- lostlogin 7mo agoThe first link in the article is better than the actual article. They don’t think it a modern loss. https://greekreporter.com/2026/04/16/ancient-greek-coin-troy-discovered-berlin/ https://greekreporter.com/2026/04/16/ancient-greek-coin-troy...
- versteegen 7mo agoEven more detail in the DW article: """ Fortunately, the boy was very precise and showed me exactly where he found it on a map. Then we went into our findings registration and found that this agricultural site was actually a well-known place," Henker explained. Berlin's Museum for Pre- and Early History has been systematically conducting surveys on empty land in Berlin since the 1950s to determine where possible excavation sites might be. In this particular spot, explains Henker, the upper layers of the soil were surveyed in the 1950s and 70s and again later. "Every time, they discovered a few distinct finds that made them say 'ok, there's probably more in the ground here'." Over the years, fragments of ceramics, Slavonic-era knives and a bronze button have been unearthed on the site, as well as burnt human bones, leading researchers to conclude that this are was used as a burial ground dating as far back as the early Iron Age — and has been in use throughout the centuries. """ https://www.dw.com/en/teen-discovers-first-ancient-greek-artifact-found-in-berlin/a-76833757 https://www.dw.com/en/teen-discovers-first-ancient-greek-art...
- ButlerianJihad 7mo agoSometimes, ancient artifacts may be dropped on your head in Berlin, especially if you’re a former angel who is hard up for money! https://youtu.be/xLfpSTmVSks?t=260&si=YvNcX7OmrVa2dXaA https://youtu.be/xLfpSTmVSks?t=260&si=YvNcX7OmrVa2dXaA
- MomsAVoxell 7mo agoI was riding my bike through the streets of Vienna one time, thoroughly enjoying the weather (springtime is glorious in Austria), and suddenly I got hit on the head by some object.. really hurt, so I slammed on the brakes, checked for blood, found a lump .. and then scanned around for the rock that hit me, thinking it’d ricocheted off a car or something .. turns out, it was a NOSE! Fallen off a statute on the top of a building I was riding past .. still got it somewhere, just as a lucky keepsake to use when I can’t find my rubber duck .. and every time I ride past that spot, I check and sure enough yup, one of those dastardly Venus’s or Apollonia’s or whatever it is, sits there, eternally nose-less from now on .. I mean, I’m not climbing up there to glue it on, and although I’m pretty sure there’s a department suitably led by an Austrian bureaucrat devoted to the subject of re-attaching lost parts of Vienna’s buildings, I don’t think I have the temerity to face the effort of bringing a fallen nose in for assessment …
- nephihaha 7mo agoGiven the prevalence of classical artefacts in Berlin Museums and the number of German collectors over the past century or two, I suspect this was lost in modern times.
- codensolder 7mo agoI remember finding what at that time seems like an ancient coins and some bones at my school playground while we were randomly digging at same place everyday to see how far we can go. On reporting it was rubbed off and we never knew what happened to those artifacts.
- vegnus 7mo ago"From Troy" and "From Troy c. 200BC" I feel like is 1,000 years of difference