Archaeologists carrying out a survey at a site in the Sojamachi District of Maebashi, the capital city of Gunma Prefecture, in the northern Kantō region of Japan ahead of a construction project have unearthed a hoard of about 100 000 coins, some of which are thought to be over 2000 years old. The coins were buried in 1060 bindles, each of which contained about 100 coins and was wrapped in straw matting, and are thought to have been buried during the Kamakura Period (1185-1333), during which Japan suffered a number of civil conflicts.
The majority of the coins are badly corroded, and need to be cleaned and examined very carefully. So far only 344 of the coins have been fully examined, with 44 types of coin so far identified. The most remarkable of these appears to be a Chinese Ban Liang coin (so called because it has the symbols Ban Liang, 半兩, meaning 'half tael' stamped upon it). These were the first coins produced in a unified Chinese Empire under the Qin Dynasty, from about 378 BC to about 249 BC, and then by the Western Han Dynasty until about 118 BC. The example in the Sojamachi hoard is thought to date from about 175 BC, and is 2.3 cm in diameter and a millimetre thick, with a square hole in the middle measuring 7 mm to a side.
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