It looked like any other 2,000-year-old coin on the day they dug it up.

Covered in two millennia's worth of rock and soil. Shrouded in mystery from a time so long ago that the Romans hadn't yet fully built their empire.

In other words, really, really dirty. So dirty that the person - most likely a college student - digging last summer at the Israeli site of a longtime University of Nebraska at Omaha archaeological dig couldn't see the famous faces on the coin. So dirty that the digger never realized she was, in fact, holding a tiny, priceless nugget of ancient civilization in the palm of her hand.

"We weren't amazed at all until we cleaned the coin and looked at it," says Rami Arav, the University of Nebraska at Omaha professor who has led the Bethsaida Excavations Project in Israel for the past 27 years. "I looked at the face and then I knew - I was looking at a face from the history books."

The face staring back at him: Cleopatra, the last pharaoh of ancient Egypt, the mother of two Roman leaders' children and one of the most powerful women in the history of the world.

He flipped it over, and there was Marc Antony, the Roman politician who happened to be one of Rome's two most important rulers at the time the coin was minted.

The Lovers' Coin, as its known, turns out to be as rare as Cleopatra herself.

Three were known to exist in the world, according to Dr. Greg Jenks, an Australian theologian and archaeologist who has worked at Bethsaida.

Experts say the coin was minted in Ptolemais, an ancient town 50 miles from Bethsaida, and put into circulation around 35 B.C., the year Marc Antony decided to move himself and a power center of the Roman Empire to Egypt.

To read the complete article, see:Hansen: UNO archaeological dig in Israel unearths priceless Cleopatra coin(www.omaha.com/article/20130906/NEWS/130909161/1685)