China Offers Reward For Decoding Ancient Gold Coins

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A Chinese museum is offering a reward to anyone who can decode the inscriptions written on six gold coins found in China’s Hunan province.

The coins which are hundreds of years old were first unearthed on a farm in the 1960s, where they had been kept inside a small glazed pot.

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The BBC reports:

They arrived at Jinshi City’s museum in the 1980s, and archaeologists have been puzzling over their markings ever since, the Xinhua news agency reports. Now the museum says it’ll hand out 10,000 yuan ($1,500; £1,100) to anyone who can help to shed light on the meaning of the coins’ etchings.

The director of the city’s Cultural Relics Bureau says they were manufactured in the Delhi Sultanate, the main Muslim sultanate in northern India, around the late 13th Century during China’s Yuan dynasty. The front of the coins bears the name of a king, written in a rare form of Arabic, Peng Jia tells the China News Service. “But the information on the back is difficult to decode. I have consulted Chinese and foreign experts, but to no avail.”