Three documented hoards of 2024 — Damanhour, Hermopolis, Fustat.
Three coin hoards entered formal documentation in 2024 through cooperation between the atlas's editorial board, the Egyptian Antiquities Authority's coin section, and the relevant governorate antiquities inspectorates. All three were registered with the EAA before any individual specimens were photographed for the atlas, and all three are now held in EAA storage with selected representative specimens on inventory loan to the relevant museum coin sections. None of the specimens has entered the antiquities market; the atlas's documentation supports the EAA's published findings rather than substituting for them.
The Damanhour Ptolemaic hoard.
Recovered in April 2024 during construction work for a new municipal water main along Sharia al-Gomhuriya in Damanhour, Beheira Governorate. The hoard was contained in a sealed ceramic jar of Ptolemaic date (probably late third century BCE), found at a depth of approximately 1.4 metres beneath the modern street surface. The construction crew handed the jar intact to the Damanhour antiquities inspectorate within twenty-four hours; the inspectorate sealed the find on site and transported it to the Alexandria EAA storage for opening under controlled conditions. The atlas was contacted by the EAA on the third day after recovery for cataloguing assistance, and Soraya el-Mursi spent four working days at the Alexandria storage facility documenting the contents.
The jar held sixty-one Ptolemaic silver tetradrachms in good preservation. Distribution by ruler: Ptolemy II Philadelphus (eighteen specimens), Ptolemy III Euergetes (twenty-four), Ptolemy IV Philopator (sixteen), Ptolemy V Epiphanes (three). All sixty-one specimens are Alexandria mint, identifiable from monograms and field marks. The hoard's terminus post quem — derived from the latest specimen, a Ptolemy V issue datable to approximately 198 BCE — places the burial in the second decade of the second century BCE, possibly in the disturbed years immediately following the Battle of Panion. The hoard's economic significance is its uniformity: all sixty-one specimens are at the Ptolemaic 14.20 g standard, with weight variation under 1.5 percent across the whole hoard, suggesting careful selection at burial rather than random accumulation.
The Hermopolis billon tetradrachm hoard.
Recovered in September 2024 from a controlled archaeological excavation at the Hermopolis Magna site in Minya Governorate, led by a joint Egyptian-Polish team working on a Roman-period domestic quarter east of the temenos. The hoard was found in situ in a small terracotta jug buried beneath the floor of a small Roman-period domestic room, dated by associated ceramic finds to the mid-third century CE. The find was reported through the standard archaeological channel; the atlas was invited to assist with cataloguing because the Polish team's numismatic specialist was unavailable.
The jug contained one hundred and ninety-four billon tetradrachms of the Alexandrian mint, dated by their regnal-year markings across a fifty-year span from Gordian III (238 – 244 CE) to Diocletian's regnal year four (288 CE). The hoard's terminus post quem of 288 CE makes it a particularly clean snapshot of late-third-century circulation in middle Egypt, immediately before the Diocletianic reform of 296 closed the Alexandrian provincial mint. The billon content varies from approximately twelve percent silver in the Gordian and Philip the Arab specimens down to under four percent in the latest Diocletianic tetradrachms — a clear documentation of the third-century debasement curve. Hamza al-Marsafi spent eleven working days at the Hermopolis dig house cataloguing the hoard.
The Fustat Fatimid dinar hoard.
Recovered in November 2024 during construction work for a new metro shaft at the southern edge of the medieval Fustat archaeological zone in Old Cairo. Workers found a small leather pouch (mostly disintegrated) containing eight Fatimid gold dinars in good preservation at a depth of approximately 2.8 metres. The find was reported to the Cairo Governorate antiquities inspectorate within hours; the metro project halted the shaft work for the controlled archaeological recovery that followed. The atlas was contacted by the Cairo EAA for the cataloguing work in mid-December.
The eight dinars are all of Cairo mint, dating to the reigns of al-Mu'izz (issued from Cairo from 973), al-Aziz, and al-Hakim — terminus post quem AH 388 (998 CE) from the latest specimen. The hoard's small size and the absence of any associated objects suggest a personal travel cache rather than a commercial or institutional deposit. The Fustat hoard is the smallest of the three 2024 finds but is the file's most numismatically interesting because the eight specimens add three previously undocumented variant readings to the Lane-Poole-Balog corpus for the al-Hakim Cairo dinars. Karim Bayoumi spent five working days at the Cairo EAA storage documenting the specimens.
Why the atlas documents hoards openly.
Coin hoards are the single most important class of numismatic evidence because they document coin assemblages at the moment of burial rather than specimens encountered separately in the modern market. A well-documented hoard provides terminus post quem dating, circulation patterns, regional preferences, weight-and-fineness controls, and political snapshots that no individual specimen can offer. The atlas's editorial position is that hoard documentation must be published openly and quickly — within a year of the recovery — because the alternative is the slow publication cycle of academic journals (typically three to seven years from recovery to first peer-reviewed publication), during which the hoard's individual specimens are inaccessible to the wider scholarly community. The atlas's published reports complement the EAA's formal scholarly publications; we do not substitute for them.
Each of the three hoards has contributed specimens to the relevant period file: the Damanhour hoard's contents are in the Ptolemaic file, the Hermopolis hoard's in the Roman file, and the Fustat hoard's in the Byzantine and Fatimid file. The atlas's attribution process applies in full to hoard material.