2,000-year-old Phoenician coin was used as bus fare in England, but ‘how it got there will always be a mystery’

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2,000-year-old Phoenician coin was used as bus fare in England, but ‘how it got there will always be a mystery’

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An intriguing coin deposited into a bus driver’s till in England in the 1950s turned out to have ancient origins: It was minted 2,000 years ago in what is now southern Spain. Now, more than 70 years later, the grandson of the former transport cashier has donated the mysteriously acquired coin to a museum.

The cashier, James Edwards, worked for Leeds City Transport and was tasked with gathering and counting fares from bus and tram drivers. Whenever he discovered fake or foreign coins, he would bring them home for his grandson, Peter.

“Neither of us were coin collectors, but we were fascinated by their origin and imagery — to me, they were treasure,” Peter Edwards said in a March 9 statement.

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a black and white image of a man sitting at a desk

James Edwards, the former chief cashier with Leeds City Transport, gathered ineligible, fake or foreign coins from bus and tram drivers. (Image credit: Leeds City Council)

But one particular coin intrigued Peter, whose research into the designs on the coin revealed that it was minted more than 2,000 years ago in a Phoenician settlement called Gadir (now known as the city of Cádiz) in Spain’s Andalusia region.

Gadir was founded by the Phoenicians, who also settled Carthage in what is now Tunisia, as their earliest colony in Western Europe in the 12th century B.C. Gadir came under Carthaginian control after the First Punic War in the early third century B.C. and then under Roman rule less than a century later.

The front side of the bronze coin bears the visage of the god Melqart — a Phoenician god who was the chief deity of Gadir, Carthage and Tyre — wearing the lion-skin headdress of Hercules. On the back of the coin are two bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus), likely a reference to the importance of the fishing industry in Gadir.

a person with a purple nitrile glove holds a coin in their hand

Kat Baxter, Leeds Museum and Galleries’ curator of archaeology and numismatics, shows the back of the ancient coin. (Image credit: Leeds City Council)

How the coin ended up in Leeds is unclear, but “it was not long after the war, so I imagine soldiers returned with coins from countries they had been sent to,” Edwards said.

Edwards has donated the coin to the Leeds Museums and Galleries so experts can study it as part of the museum’s collection of ancient currency. Kat Baxter, the curator of archaeology and numismatics for the museums, confirmed in the statement that the coin is around 2,000 years old and was minted in Gadir.

“Museums like ours are not just about preserving objects, they’re also about telling stories like this one and inspiring visitors to think about the history that’s all around us, sometimes in the most unlikely of places,” Leeds City Councillor Salma Arif said in the statement.

“My grandfather would be proud to know, as I am, that the coin is coming back to Leeds,” Edwards said. “However, how it got there will always be a mystery.”