For real! As you know, I’ve been reading through The City of Akhenaten II looking for info on bathroom/lavatories. Rather unobtrusively on p.59 came this passage:
[House] 76 was entered from Crock of Gold Square, by a door in a curved boundary wall.
Hmmmm. Odd name for a place, ‘Crock of Gold Square’, wonder where they got that from? The other streets have fairly descriptive names, such as Straight Street and Greek Street, apparently named thus by various excavators based on their characteristics or what sort of objects were found there. Musta missed mention of any crocks of gold though. . . .
To the north and east are two small courts, in the latter of which lay a small jar with a saucer over the mouth as a lid. With a certain amount of unwillingness to perform what they knew by experience to be a fruitless and troublesome task, the workmen prized [you never hear that word anymore, ed.] off the lid and shook the earth inside to loosen it. A bar of gold dropped out.
! ! ! ! !
Well, that’s pretty cool. But wait, there’s more!
There came twenty-two bars of gold, much silver, and a figurine of a Hittite god in silver with a gold cap.
Yowsa. Probably needless to say, I’ve never found anything like that. Makes my little bronze mirror seem fairly pathetic in comparison. Now, recall that they had brought up the term ‘Crock of Gold Square’ in passing early on a previous page, leaving the reader to wonder just what the heck was going on. He rounds it out in typical understated fashion:
Now perhaps the name — ‘Crock of Gold Square’ — seems justified to you.
I’ve posted several times on other hordes like this (e.g., here and here), and one often wonders what they were for. Owners hiding their possessions before an invasion? For some ritual purpose? Here, they speculate otherwise:
This hoard, found as it was in the courtyard of a hovel, must have formed part of a thief’s loot. Perhaps he had even raided the Hall of Foreign Tribute, less than a mile away; he had melted down all the gold and was already using it, for he had cut off pieces as he needed them, from the bars; he had crushed up the silver ready to be melted down and then the end came.
I had been thinking this may have been a craftsman’s store, perhaps a jewelers, that he had kept in a safe place, although there isn’t any indication of factory work going on nearby. Seems odd that a thief would be melting his loot down, which seems to me rather a conspicuous activity, sure to attract attention. I suppose he could have stolen a jewelers store of raw material and been cutting it up to use as his own store of wealth. Seems plausible to me, although I suppose that’s about all you can say about it.
They have a whole page devoted to photos of the find both when it was found, opened, and a composite of the contents, as well as a detailed description of the contents. Definitely a spectacular find. It ends with this little (literally) footnote to the find:
The vase was lying less than a foot below the surface. A chip had been made in the lid . . . by the tethering stake of a local worthy. His feelings on hearing what he had missed are recorded, but inconvenient to print.
Ha!
