semiopen

Here is a bizarre story making the rounds.

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/133601

This is from the unlicensed right wing zionist Israeli news organization Arutz Sheva.

The "coins" have a picture of a cow (for Pharoh's dream?) and some hieroglyphics which say "Joseph" and "Saba Sabini" Genesis 41:45
gives his name as "tsâphenath pa`enêach"

This is important in proving the literal truth of the Koran (was there ever any doubt?), more than likely a bunch of crap.

bacht

It sounds too good to be true. And how is the Koran a useful source for information about Pharaonic Egypt?

Toto

Jerusalem Post article

The comments show a bit of skepticism about this. The artifacts appear to be amulets, not coins, and the identification of Joseph is problematic.

Middle eastern politics and the economics of the tourist trade appear to be the important points.

Diogenes the Cynic

Some comments from Michael heiser at Paleobabble.

The only source is this Egyptian tabloid, and a lot of the claims are tendentious at best. "The time of Joseph?" What time was that?

These items are also scarabs, not coins , the identification with the Biblical Joseph is, to put it mildly, highly questionable, and two of the claims are self-contradictory. It claims (without providing any basis) that the "coins are from the time of Jospeph, but then claims they are from the earliest stages of hieroglyphic writing. The traditional era of Joseph is well after those early stages.

Since there has been no peer review, and since the claim seems to be made primarily in the hopes of bolstering a historical claim in the Koran that Egypt used coins during the time of Joseph, I don't think there's much here.