2017-06-26 Mon

The ancient city of Emesus in Syria is known as Homs, where a large conical black meteorite stood in the 3rd century that was the symbol of the God Elagabalus, the Syrian god of the mountains. However, in 218 C.E., a new Roman emperor came into the picture, hailing from Emesus, he took the throne and also got the royal name Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus. He served as a priest of Elagabalus and only after his assassination in 222; he was named after the Syrian god.

Elagabalus was popularly known as the most corrupt emperors in Roman history who promoted bloodshed. But he had a soft corner for women and granted rights to women. According to various sources, he wanted to change his gender and embrace the female anatomy. The coins made during his years clearly indicated this ideology. One side of the coin depicts the face of the emperor while on the other side are horses pulling a chariot, carrying the old meteorite with the Roman eagle above it.

The coin is open for people to see in a new exhibit at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.”Faces of Power: Coins from the Victor Adda Collection” displays 75 gold coins of Roman emperors and their wives never shown to the public before. Johanna Adda Cohen, a resident of Rome donated the collection of gold coins to the Israel Museum. Victor Adda was her father, who was a Jewish businessman from Egypt and it was he who collected the coins in the first half of the 20th century. They moved to Italy and smuggled the coins, putting them in the pockets of relatives and friends.

The exhibition displays 75 coins and the collection was enormous. Victor Adda distributed the coins amongst his four daughters, each daughter receiving an almost entire collection. The curators of the temporary exhibition in the archaeology wing of the museum are Haim Gitler and Yaniv Schauer.

The oldest coin features the portrait of Julius Caesar on a Roman coin. He used his own portrait on coins which signified the change to one-man rule and was one of the reasons for his assassination. A later coin minted by one of the most famous murderers in history, Brutus, depicts the dagger, a symbol of the assassination.