Toshio Tsumura Essay

The eyes of a meeting excavator lit up when he was demonstrated the 10 minor, corroded plates that had sat unnoticed away for over two years at a burrow on a southern Japan islandHe had been to archeological locales in Italy and Egypt, and perceived the "little round things" as old coins, including a couple of likely dating to the Roman Empire.

"I was so energized I practically overlooked what I was there for, and the coins were all we discussed," said Toshio Tsukamoto of the Gangoji Institute for Research of Cultural Property in Nara, an antiquated Japanese capital close Kyoto.

The disclosure, declared a month ago, is bewildering. How did the coins, some dating to the third or fourth century, end up a large portion of a world away in a medieval Japanese palace on the island of Okinawa? Specialists

Four of the coins have are from the third to fourth-century Roman Empire, and a fifth one from the seventeenth century Ottoman Empire. The staying five are as yet being analyzed.

The coins, which are in plain view at the Uruma City Yonagusuku Historical Museum through Nov. 25, were uncovered from around 1 meter (yard) underground in a layer accepted to be from the fourteenth to fifteenth century.

"At to begin with, we didn't think they were coins. Those little round things, to us, appeared like protective layer parts," said Masaki Yokoo, a city official responsible for the archeological venture.

Subtle elements that were scarcely recognizable developed all the more obviously in X-beam investigation. One bears a picture of fourth-century Roman Emperor Constantine I, and another demonstrates a helmeted fighter holding a shield in one hand, while wounding a foe with a lance in the other.

The Ottoman coin is engraved with the year equal to 1687, Yokoo