As Jay GT4 says, the news reports usually give exciting information that lacks full numismatic context. But the following is an interesting statement well worth trying to understand:
All told, in Israel to date there are 193 archaeologically provenanced coins which were minted locally throughout the Holy Land during the Persian era.
The key phrase is "
archaeologically provenanced" coins. Judaean/Samarian coins aren't my specialty, but I've read many of the recent references trying to understand the scholarship surrounding one of my own coins (
gallery [LINK]), a mid-4th cent. BCE Samarian
Obol (which I believe counts as "Persian era" in
Judaea [?], or at least a close neighbor):
That coin would NOT count coin among the 193 archaeologically provenanced coins -- even though it was
part of an important
hoard (
Samaria Hoard, before 1990) published by a Director and Chief Curator at
Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and member of the
Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), Ya'akhov
Meshorer (1935-2004), along with Shraga Qedar (1933-2015), who worked more as a commercial
numismatist.
Just like anywhere, coins from secured academic archaeological excavations are much rarer than coins of uncertain origin, unprovenanced finds, and/or
hoards with only approximate find data. This one was not excavated by archaeologists, so we don't know exactly when or where it was found, and can't be 100% certain of the
hoard's contents or context.
The number of coins discovered from this era and region have really exploded since the 1990s, but
still only a few excavation finds are documented. There are a few "corpuses" of known specimens, which surely count many hundreds or more. Wyssman (2019) is the most comprehensive I know (
Vielfältig Geprägt: Das Spätperserzeitliche Samaria und Seine Münzbilder). (My coin above is cited on p. 296 as MQ187.i -- in 1991 it was the only known specimen, by 2019 there were at least 11!) It was open source from ZORA (Zurich Open Repository and Archive), but the site doesn't seem to be loading:
https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/181879 (I have Wyssman 2019 as PDF, downloaded legally [so it appeared, but if ZORA remains down it'll be hard to double-check], for anyone who wants it.)
I felt comfortable
buying that coin, given that it was published by
Meshorer, but I've also got another early coin from the region (Philistia/Palestine/Gaza?) -- an
Athens type Hemiobol -- for which I sadly have no
collection / find
history beyond
Agora Auctions 18 in 2014
[LINK] (but
still searching!):