Middle schooler finds coin from Troy in Berlin | Hacker News Reader

Middle schooler finds coin from Troy in Berlin

thehistoryblog.com

272 pointsspeckx128 comments

As 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.

When 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.

I've had that happen a couple times, too. The first time I was super excited, and looked up the collectable price, and it was like $8 for a (pristine) $5 bill. I think I kept it for a few days to show to people, and then spent it. I inherited a couple from my dad last year, and the collectors' price hadn't changed, so I did the same thing. Still cool, though. I hope whatever cashier received them from me got a similar thrill.

I 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.

You can get new $2 from your bank

And 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".

> 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)

For the unaware, Steve Wozniak buys sheets of uncut $2 bills and spends them. He’ll walk into a location and tear off a $2 bill like a serrated coupon.

There’s probably a better link but this was at hand: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/steve-wozniak-2-dollar-bil...

Every time I picture him doing that, I laugh.

It’s hard not to love that guy.

It's so crazy particularly because it's not just some random dude but one of the co-founders of Apple[1] (for those unaware)!

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Wozniak

> serrated coupon

Perforated coupons. (It’s too late to edit the above.)

Many years ago a friend of mine used to tip bartenders and servers with dollar coins (a dollar tip on a drink was good at the time). They remembered him for that and he got better service even though it was probably a bit of a PITA for them to deal with the coins. $2 bills could probaby be used in a similar fashion.

Tips are a good use because they go into the pocket, not the cash register - and it makes you memorable.

> they go into the pocket

That is, assuming the worker has a pocket to receive the tips.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_two-dollar_bill#...

Or at the strip club

I 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.

They're socially awkward to spend, because people don't want to take them. That was true each of the four or five times I used bills from my father's stash, though I was outright refused only once. Unlike my father, I don't enjoy needlessly provoking minor hostility, so I turned them into the bank. We're all just gabbing on the internet, my dude. You might find $2 bills a fun investment.

I know and do; it's a question if I get one in change or otherwise.

(IIRC some businesses used to give change in $2 to show their "influence" on the area.)

It’s probably been that since I used cash. Kids pocket money is the last frontier in our house. We even managed travel between 3/4 countries without any. Wise is great.

I worked as a part-time bank teller from age 1999-2007 (not continuously). Over that time the volume of silver certificates and other special currency coming in dropped DRAMATICALLY. From 1999-2003 I'd say I would see those bills come in about every other month; I don't think I saw a single one in the final two years I worked the job.

I "purchased" (i.e., exchanged my own money for) every bill and coin that came in. And before anyone makes any assumptions, I had permission from the bank manager.

Wow. I like how those look almost like modern bills except for a cool seal and text saying it's redeemable for silver, subtle flex.

Only time I ever got rare money was a buffalo / Indian head nickel as change in a cafe very recently, not a valuable form though.

I have a similar story, but I was playing on the beach. There was a mound right next to it and I would love to play there, and the mound had some funny stones. One of them was square with something painted on it, I was fascinated by romans so I annoyed my parents with "I found a mosaic!" and took it with me.

Turns out, years later, they excavated a roman villa there. Funnily enough, the same beach has roman villas, dinosaur prints, austro-hungarian tunnels and yugoslavian bunkers. Quite a lot of history in one pretty beach.

As the saying goes, "location location location". Must have been a pretty strategically important beach.

Especially for dinosaurs

Slovenian/Croatian coast?

I took my kids to one of those gaming centers (skee ball, claw machines, etc.) and stumbled across a 19th century 50-cent piece in the change machine. It apparently is worth about $150 last time I checked.

> if you tell me someone just stumbles onto and old coin...

I found a bill from the Weimar hyperinflation era. Its face value was several billion (Milliarden). Its only value was as a curiosity.

Who doesn’t miss the days when a Milliarden was worth something?

It was probably hours not days, in that case!

The oldest coin in my collection is an 1838 large cent, which my dad says he found as a kid in a crack in the sidewalk. He was born more than 100 years after that date.

Unsure 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

Berlin 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.

I 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.

I wonder if there were street vendors selling little replicas of the wooden horse.

When 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.

I 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.

You might be interested in this, a list by Stripe's founder.

https://patrickcollison.com/fast

"Be careful building that thing! It might go off!"

Don'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...

IIRC, 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.

Trade =/= globalisation.

Was there anything resembling tourism in 300 BC?

"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

Yes, definitely. There was tourism in Greece in the Classical Period, too. Epidaurus is a good example: a major religious sanctuary, side by side with a theatre and athletics venues, all part of the thriving local economy propped up entirely by tourism. Fun fact: history's first recorded hypochondriac was a frequent patient/visitor at the temple of Asclepius in Epidaurus.

There were “pilgrimages”, trade, and extended families. Joseph traveled with his brothers to Egypt long before 300 BC

Alexander the Great visited it in 334 BC: https://greekreporter.com/2025/09/07/alexander-the-great-vis...

Edit: this was also mentioned in the article

not exactly a tourist :) but the point stands

I dunno, given the reputation we Americans have as tourists, it'd be nice to point out good ol' Alex and say, "hey, it could be worse!"

not only there was, people were still people and we have roman and greek graffiti on monuments ("X was here" and similar).

according to medieval reports the white limestone surfaces of the pyramids were absolutely cluttered with Egyptian Roman and other in eligible graffiti

For example the great pyramids were already a popular "tourist" destination hundreds of years before christ.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pyramid_of_Giza#Historio...

It seems that a major objective of Judaism’s monotheism and singular Temple complex was predicated on being “A Light to All Nations” and a central, exclusive focus for pilgrimage (and therefore, economic activity) during the Jewish feasts.

In fact this is exactly the same situation which drives pro-Israel sentiment in modern times: pilgrimage == tourism == $$$.

There was trading, and that alone could shift objects well away from their original locations without any contact with the original creators.

There were also nomads, pilgrimages (as some have said), and African swallows.

That's covered in the article.

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. Cesar managed to be kidnapped by pirates doing something like that, if I remember it correctly.

> 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.

The og question is about two centuries earlier. Time matters.

Define tourism, though. Even quit a bit before 300 BC Herodotus did go to Egypt for not particularly practical reasons

To write a travel guide papyrus. :)

I 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

The 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.

The 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.

Official German press statment: https://www.berlin.de/landesdenkmalamt/aktivitaeten/presse/2...

Sometimes, 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

I 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 …

Most 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.

Berlin 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.

The 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...

Even 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-art...

This article 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.

Given 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.

I 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.

Can'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.

You can walk around the USA and find flint arrowheads ... not sure the Native Americans used coins as such.

Yeah 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 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_Cave_mummy#Dating

The 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.

The 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

did they leave behind significant amounts of writing?

Nope. Which is what makes it so difficult. Additionally, adjacent nations like the Navajo, Apache, and others are very tight lipped about their extremely robust ancestral and oral history because of bad experiences along with taboos.

It felt like a mix of rightful wariness due to untrustworthy opportunistic anthropologists from the 19th and 20th century along with taboos that developed due to some sort of collapse.

Indeed! If you're around Taos, NM, there are several national/state parks that contain the remaining structures of the Pueblans.

The Puye Cliff Dwellings are over 1,000 year olds, and you can free roam most of them. It is quite wild being able to go into cave dwellings in the cliff. I'd highly recommend visiting if anyone is considering it.

I grew up in the bed of a drained lake (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Portage#:~:text=this%2...), so there were no native American artifacts to be found. The best we could do were the foundations of some homes that had been on sanitary district land but then torn down with the area reverting to forest (sadly, this forested area which was open to exploration when I was a kid has since been fenced off).

Growing up as a kid, we used to find old wagon wheels and arrow heads frequently. There used to be an old fort not far from where my parent's house was located. A limestone creek ran on the back part of their property and defined the property line. We'd find all sorts of artifacts up and down this creek. I even came across a rock with an circular hole that was obviously bored into it and charring around the hole. I used to have some interesting show-n-tells. This was in the 80s.

Old trade beads can sometimes be found, old stashes and caches. Pony beads, seed beads, and others. They were traded/used as "money". The Hudson's Bay Company brought millions of them to this continent.

https://surface.syr.edu/beads/vol2/iss1/6/

I feel the same way about the US. Can't imagine the vast wilderness you still have. I've never been somewhere truly wild and untouched by man.

> truly wild and untouched by man.

In the US you can find truly wild places, but it is pretty hard to find places untouched by man. Humans have been here for at least 15000 years, and from the very beginning were having huge impacts on the ecology.

Downtown Los Angeles has a pretty famous park and museum with fossils of preserved megafauna that have been extinct for millennia still regularly found just chilling in a bubbling lake of oil. I even worked there 25 years ago.

La Brea tarpits, the essential LA elementary school field trip

And well known to fans of Dr Demento. This is the Wikipedia about “Hancock Park” the city park that contains the tar pits and museum. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hancock_Park

There is also a district of the city that contains NIMBYs and other fossils, by a similar name.

Pico and Sepulveda! Pico and Sepulveda!

I remember it well and now I can’t get that stinger out of my head

I left you an email. Closed Links.

the museum is small but excellent; it has a wall covered just in Dire Wolf skulls found there

What's it called?

La Brea tarpits

The the tar tar pits.

(La Brea means "the tar").

A bit west of downtown, too, but I'm an annoying pedant.

Then it’s actually “The tar tar pits”. ;)

Sounds kinda like a Mario 64 stage.

There's a pub a few minutes from me that was built in the 1620s and every time I go past it strikes be just how long ago that is.

That's roughly when The Mayflower set off, and St Peter's Basilica was built. And it's still a working pub, open every day.

https://www.theoldeboarshead.co.uk/about-the-pub/

No 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?

I found some more information in this other article: https://www.dw.com/en/teen-discovers-first-ancient-greek-art...

""After we understood where it came from, I had the task of figuring out where this coin was found exactly. 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'sMuseum 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.

"At first, archaeologists wondered if the coin was a “modern loss”—perhaps dropped by a collector in recent years. However, a professional excavation of the discovery site suggests a much deeper connection.

The field was found to be a multi-layered historical site, containing Bronze Age and Iron Age burial remains, Roman-era artifacts, and even a medieval Slavic knife fitting. This “archaeological context” suggests the coin likely arrived in the region centuries ago, rather than falling out of someone’s pocket last week."

If I get that right, the student somehow managed to find the coin in a field, and after archaeologists started digging and found a whole historical site.

Since the location is a field, I imagine the coin had come to the surface when the farmer was plowing the field, or something like that. Still, why was the student walking in a field? Germans are known for going on walks, but why in a field? Was he or she in the field with the express purpose of trying to find something interesting, maybe even using a metal detector? Or was it a purely accidental find?

Spandau occupies a commanding position on the wide confluence of Spree and Havel river. It is part of the wider river networks and one can easily navigate to Elbe and Danube. The coin might have ended up here via trade.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/aFfBzWNgnMiCvdHf6

There'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...

Back in my day, if you uncovered some priceless historical artifact, the least the newspaper could do is print your friggin' name in the article. Did some nearby archaeology professor already swindle the kid out of the coin and call dibs or something?

Does he get the coin back after the museum is done showing it?

"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.

> 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 (in German)

[2] For details see https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schatzregal#Deutschland (in German)

Yeah 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.

I'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?

Earth 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.

"From Troy" and "From Troy c. 200BC" I feel like is 1,000 years of difference

Did Schliemann pass through Berlin, maybe?

That, 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.

Rarely do I think "that would make great poem"

Whoever dropped that coin is going to be very upset!

That'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.

so how much is this coin worth ?

> 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.

Germany was populated in antiquity?

Romans referred to the region where they came into contact with villages across the Rhine as "Germania."

Germany was only populated in olden times. The present name for (most of) the region is Deutschland.

Is this a joke?

Probably 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.

I 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.

"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)

I don't get why people capable of making complex bas-relief could not make the coin more or less round

It 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).

Do 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.

Fairly 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".

Antiquity slop

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