Certain silver coins of “Eleazar the Priest,” marked (by the alphabetic characters used) as being of the Hasmonæan age, have been rashly attributed to Eleazar, who defended the Temple in 70 A. D. In at least one instance the coin is regarded as a forgery by both de Vogüé and de Saulcy, and this appears to apply to all the so-called “coins of the revolts.” The copper ones bear blundered imitations of genuine inscriptions from coins of Simon the Hasmonæan. They have been struck on much defaced Roman coins of Vespasian, Titus, Domitian, and Trajan, but more probably in the nineteenth century than in the second century. One such coin bears the name Simon, and is struck on a silver tetradrachm of Antioch attributed to Vespasian. It does not seem to have occurred to the scholars who suppose it to have been struck by Simon, son of Gioras, in 70 A. D., that as Vespasian had then only been emperor a few months, and as Jerusalem was besieged, it is quite impossible that an old coin of his reign could have been found in the city in the year of its fall. The forgery of Jewish coins is still common in Palestine, and the forgers did not foresee that the remains of the original legend on a coin would be read by the trained eye of some European specialist, while they thought that the worn surface of the coin would show its antiquity, but that its value would be much higher if it was regarded as being Jewish. The same observation applies to all the restruck copper coins, which have been variously attributed to Simon son of Gioras, to Simon son of Gamaliel, and to Bar Cocheba, who has been conjectured to have been also named Simon--of which there is no proof at all. The latter assumption was necessitated by the fact that some of the coins used by the forgers were as late as the reigns of Domitian and Trajan. It may, however, be remarked that if the Jews, in 135 A. D., struck any coins at all, the lettering is not likely to have been in the same characters used about 139 B. C., but would have been in those used at the time, that is to say, practically in square Hebrew. We may regard these coins, therefore, as forged imitations of those of Simon the Hasmonæan, and they have no bearing on the question whether Jerusalem had been rebuilt before 135 A. D. Appian[387] was a contemporary historian, but says nothing about any siege of Jerusalem, which city he tells us was “razed to the ground by Vespasian.” He adds, “And anew by Hadrian in my time”--the word “built” having perhaps dropped out, unless further demolitions were needed to clear the site for the new city. [Sidenote: FORGED COINS]