A massive hoard of pure gold Fatimid dinars dating back to 996 A.D. is delighting scientists not only because of its immense value but also because of its incredible historical significance.

The unprecedented find is the largest gold hoard ever discovered in the eastern Mediterranean, according to archaeologists. Initial tests indicate the coins are 24 karat gold with a purity of upwards of 95 percent.

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Archaeologists said some of the dinars were in "mint" condition while others had been in circulation for some time. Several of the coins show tooth marks, indicating skeptical persons employed a "bite test" to assess the authenticity of the pure Fatimid gold coins.

The coins are of two different denominations: whole dinars and quarter dinars. They are of various weights and sizes.

Sport divers scouring an ancient shipwreck off the north-central coast of Israel near the ancient harbor of Caesarea found the hoard earlier this month. Divers from the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) and the divers returned to the site to discover how vast this treasure was.

"So we went back and performed a small excavation. After two hours, we had found something like one thousand coin", said Jakob Sharvit, director of the IAA Marine Archaeology Unit.

"We were shocked," he recalls. "We were so incredibly excited, but when you're underwater, you can't talk to each other. It was only when we surfaced and pulled out our regulators that we could scream with happiness".

The divers then recovered another thousand coins last week. The total of more than 2,00 pure gold dinar coins already makes the find five times as large as what has until now been considered the largest known gold coin hoard ever found in Israel: a cache of 376 Fatimid dinars discovered in the early 1960s.

The historical value of the cache is immense, said archaeologists.

"They're first-class historical documents," said Robert Kool, curator of the IAA's Coin Department.

Fatimid dinars show the names of the caliphs they were minted under, plus the date and location where they were minted. The earliest coin was minted in Palermo, Sicily while the majority came from official Fatimid mints in Egypt.

The dinars date to the reigns of Caliphs al-Hakim (A.D. 996-1021) and his son al-Zahir (A.D. 1021-1036).

The Fatimid Caliphate was a Shia Islamic caliphate that controlled a large area of North Africa, from the Red Sea in the east to the Atlantic Ocean in the west. Egypt was the center of the caliphate. At its height, the caliphate included areas of the Maghreb, Sudan, Sicily, the Levant, and Hijaz.

At its height in the mid-tenth to mid-eleventh centuries A.D., Fatimid rule stretched across North Africa and Sicily to the Levant, with trade ties that extended all the way to China. From its capital in Cairo, the caliphate controlled access to gold from sources in West Africa to the Mediterranean.