Cool Finds

Did Ancient Jews Hide These Coins for Safekeeping During a Fourth-Century Revolt Against Roman Rule?

A cache of coins bearing the faces of the Roman emperors Constantius II and Constans I was discovered in underground tunnels created by Jews in what is now northern Israel

Sonja Anderson | Daily Correspondent

September 24, 2025

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Archaeologists in Israel have discovered a hoard of bronze Roman coins in an underground complex. Dated back to the fourth century C.E., the coins were likely hidden during the little-known Gallus Revolt, one of the rebellions staged by ancient Jewish people against their Roman oppressors.

The 22 coins were found in a tunnel complex beneath a settlement called Hukok in northern Israel, near the Sea of Galilee. According to a statement from the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), the network of tunnels and rooms was created by local Jews between 66 and 70 C.E., during the Great Revolt, the first Jewish rebellion against Roman rule.

Back in 63 B.C.E., the expanding Roman Republic had conquered Jerusalem and taken control of the region. When the Jews revolted in 66 C.E., Roman Emperor Nero ordered the rebellion crushed. Decades of conflict followed. The Jews revolted again in 132 C.E., after Roman Emperor Hadrian restricted Jewish religious practices. The rebels improved and utilized the Hukok tunnels. The Romans suppressed the Bar Kokhba Revolt, too, then forbade Jews from entering Jerusalem.

The coins recently discovered in the tunnels don’t date to either of these conflicts. Instead, they feature the visages of Emperors Constantius II and Constans I, two of the three brothers who jointly ruled the Roman Empire after the death of their father, Constantine the Great, in 337 C.E. The third brother, Constantine II, was killed in 340, leaving Constantius and Constans to share power until the latter’s death in 350. Constantius ruled alone for the next decade, until 361.

“This shows that hundreds of years after these tunnels were dug out, they were reused,” say Uri Berger, an archaeologist at the IAA, and Yinon Shivtiel, a cave archaeologist at Zefat Academic College, in the statement. “The hoard provides, in all probability, unique evidence that this hiding complex was used in one way or another during another crisis: during the Gallus Revolt, a rebellion for which we have only scant historical evidence of its existence.”

The Gallus Revolt, which took place in 351 and 352 C.E., is named after Flavius Claudius Constantius Gallus (also known as Gallus Caesar), the statesman who ruled Rome’s eastern provinces—including Judea—during the reign of his cousin Constantius. Gallus extinguished the rebellion, and historians don’t know much about its events. As Shivtiel tells the Times of Israel’s Rossella Tercatin, almost no archaeological evidence of the revolt has been found.

“A priest named Hieronymus wrote briefly about the revolt, saying the Jews began their rebellion in Tzipori but were quickly crushed by the Romans,” Shivtiel tells the Times. “Now we can see that the Jews of the Galilee followed the path of their forefathers, retreating into the hiding complexes with their possessions—including this hoard of coins.”

This isn’t the first stash of Gallus Revolt coins to be unearthed in Israel. Last year, archaeologists from the IAA discovered 94 coins beneath the floor of a fourth-century C.E. building in Lod, southeast of Tel Aviv. The coins were minted between 221 and 354 C.E., with about 25 of them dating to the time of the Gallus Revolt. As excavation co-director Mor Viezel told Haaretz’s Ruth Schuster in June 2024, “We surmise that it was an emergency hoard of money that somebody buried because the rebellion began.”

Experts have a similar theory about the recently discovered bronze coins. The money was deposited “in a pit, deliberately dug at the end of a narrow, winding tunnel,” the researchers say in the statement. They believe that 1,600 years ago, people carefully stashed the collection during the Jewish rebellion, “hoping to return to it when the threatening troubles were over.”

Sonja Anderson | Read More

Sonja Anderson is a writer and reporter based in Chicago.