Ancient coins intercepted in Chicago returned to Greece.

Well said.

I was going ro quote the exact same passage. Exactly how @GinoLR sir is it "obvious it is from illegal digging or appropriation"? Prove to me it was not a farmer plowing his field finding a broken pot with it inside? Prove to me it is not a poor family having a blessing from heaven of an asset that will make their life just a little easier for a period of time. Instead, you are concluding it MUST be proof of someone destroying a historically important dig or stealing from a museum? See how your logic is a vast overreach? Again, I agree with Elgin marbles, etc, but this further argument is degrading your earlier points.

Another aspect of this is the hard fact source countries have done a fairly poor job actually preserving these items. Look at the Buddhist sculptures in Afghanistan, whole ancient cities in Syria, the Great Wall in China. Arguing that MORE of the world's cultural heritage should be returned is simply ignoring these hard facts. How many important items have been destroyed at the BM or the Smithsonian? I would guess far fewer than in Cairo, etc.

 

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Nonsense? I could at least understand this point of view but, on this topic, the burden of proof must be on the seller and not the archaeologists who suspect coins surfacing in an auction may be blood antiquities or stolen items.

And to quote @medoraman :
"a farmer plowing his field finding a broken pot with it inside? Prove to me it is not a poor family having a blessing from heaven of an asset that will make their life just a little easier"? I can tell you what happens in such case: a poor farmer is nobody in some countries. As soon as he tries to show his find to anybody else for estimation, or to sell it, all the vultures will rush on this carcass: local cops, local authorities, everyone in position of creating him problems will demand his share. At best the poor farmer will get peanuts, and 90% of the benefit made in Zurich, London or New York will go to professional traffickers and corrupt moghuls who can access the international market. In many cases, these moghuls have links with the local organized crime or are leaders of terrorist organizations.

I can give examples. An enormous underwater hoard discovered in Gaza in 2013 and 2017, containing dozens of decadrachms of Alexander, of which less than 17 only were previously known. In an ideal world, it should have been a groundbreaking archaeological discovery, probably a wreck of the 310s BC containing bronze statues, bronze items, and thousands of silver Alexander coins. The statues immediately vanished, nobody knows where they are now. The auctioning in Western countries of the unprovenanced new decadrachms made the value of a very fine specimen plummet from 325,000 EUR in 2014 (this one had a real provenance, its sale was honest) to 23,000 USD in 2020... But the local fishermen who found the coins on the seafloor did not profit from the sales: they just got a few hundred dollars. Those who pocketed the benefit were people who could bribe the right people in Gaza (Hamas, of course) and in Israel, because they could reach the right Swiss, US and British auction firms. And what about numismatists, archaeologists, historians? All that is left for them to study is the few coins seized by the local Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities: just a few percent of the total hoard, the actual composition of which we'll never know.

There are other examples. All the Lihyan silver drachms that were unknown before 2012 and that are now sold and auctioned on a regular basis. It is obvious that they come from a hoard or an archaeological site of Saudi Arabia, but nobody knows which one, and that this source of Lihyan drachms is being illegally plundered to feed the market. I could mention too an umayyad bronze statuette stolen in Jordan from the very archaeological exavation, and an exceptional Roman gold ring with a cameo stolen from the very safe of the Jordanian Direction of Antiquities (that's crazy !) : both ended in the same London private collection, the gold ring was lately auctioned in Germany, and nothing could be done.

The Western authorities are slowly becoming conscious of the wide range of this industry, and of the necessity of doing something. Dealers and auctioneers must realize that not asking questions is not tolerable any more. Do we want collecting ancient coins becoming a morally suspect hobby? I don't, and I am sure you don't too.

 

Sir, I believe you are mismatching your arguments. Everything you say about proven digs, antiquities, etc I am agreeing with, but you are conflating those instances and saying they always apply to coins. "The burden of proof must always be on the seller", guilty until proven innocent? How would we "prove" this to you? How do you prove it was found in a field absent a sensible country like the UK who incentivizes reporting? Your example given of the farmer is EXACTLY my argument of why morally bankrupt countries who confiscate private property is wrong. Many do this exactly to create bribe situations and steal from the poor. One of my economics professors was an expert in world laws and effects on prosperity. He proved the more overbearing the laws, the poorer the country. Basically, countries are poor based upon their governments laws, this being one of them.

 

Of course we all condemn tyranny, corruption and confiscation of private property, but this is how things actually work in many countries. We are left with three solutions:
A) Invade, topple corrupt regime, replace it with another one considered better, and... er... Been there, done that, not a so good idea, after all.
B) Proudly say we disapprove tyranny and corruption, but be realistic and try to make it profitable for ourselves. For ex. by doing business with no questions asked.
C) Try to moralize business by banning untraceable transactions. Would I buy a car with no documents, just because I cannot prove the guy did not find it abandoned in the wild?

 

There have been so many uncontrolled (yet fully legal) excavations for so long, I think it is unfair to insist we verify a long-standing provenance or find spot for most of the coins we buy. That might be doable for elite collectors, but not the hoi poloi like myself.

 

On the one hand, this sounds unpleasantly like the White Man's Burden.

On the other hand, we have the Taliban and statues, as mentioned elsewhere in the thread. Some regimes aren't so much "primitive" or "uncivilized" as anti-civilized.

 

But is it wrong Jeff? How many artifacts do we know are destroyed forever versus safely In a western museum? I would never condone the logic, but are the results incorrect? How many billions have poured into Egypt and into Egyptian history due to some artifacts are in the west? Look at all of the scholarship on coins the west has been done on the coins while we have proof coins Egypt has confiscated rot in bags in basements of Cairo museums?

Bottom line to me, since I believe all history belong to all humans, is "have more items been saved by being in the west, and have more researched been done, than would have been true if they were not here? I do not think any rational scholar could argue it has not been beneficial to humans that this happened, however the reason.

 

How about we declare any items that can either be proven to be looted from an important site, or if an antiquity reasonably be shown it was, cannot have good title and not allow them in. However, coins are not antiquities and were manufactured to be traded, so unless proven it was an illegal dig it should not be assumed. At the same time, yes, it is business as usual. We should not morally uphold immoral, confiscatory laws anywhere.

You wish to have our customs an agent of totalitarian, confiscatory regimes. What is next, enforce all arrest warrants for all nations regardless of crime or evidence? Like all of our jurisprudence, innocent until proven guilty should be our basis of justice.

 

While highly unlikely, there's still a possibility of the coin actually getting to Thailand even in antiquity, not by Romans per se, but by the merchant ships from Tamil kingdoms. Romans have done trade with India and Sri Lanka, as there are gold coins excavated from the Tamil Nadu region now reside at the British Museum,


Even I have a bunch of Roman imitative coins from Sri Lanka (circa 5-6th century), they resemble those from Constantine era. The coin below comes from the same hoard, it's not an imitation but an actual follis of Constans from the Heraclea mint.

 

I agree. It's well documented Indian trade, and many Roman gold coins were found there, and later local imitations. However, India valued gold. I was simply making the point that Thailand simply did not value copper that way, their coinage system was silver-tin-lead based, so even if it came in antiquity it would have been as a curiosity, not as coinage value. Given that, it might be more likely a more recent transplant.

 

I think this may not be accurate. While it's possible for any coin to be sold at a minor auction and sell cheaply unnoticed, I think a VF dekadrachm of Alexander would sell for much more than 23K.

Given the publicity that these finds have created, any serious collector & any auction house would be extremely careful that an Alexander dekadrachm would be provenanced or legally okay for sale & export before they even attempted to sell such a thing.

Would you have the auction reference for this sale? I bet the dekadrachm is quite corroded.

 

Here are some recent examples :
The New York Sale 48 lot 5 (1.14.2020) : starting price $ 24,000, hammer price $ 29,000.
This coin was auctioned again 5 months later :
Ira and Larry Goldberg 116 lot 809 (6.2.2020) : starting price $ 20,000, hammer price $ 23,000.
https://www.numisbids.com/n.php?p=lot&sid=3864&lot=809

Roma Numismatics auction 17 lot 397 (3.28.2019) : est £ 20,000, hammer £ 16,000 !!!
https://www.numisbids.com/n.php?lot=397&p=lot&sid=3081

Roma Numismatics auction 23 lot 175 (3.24.2022) : est. £ 30,000, hammer 26,000
https://www.numisbids.com/n.php?lot=175&p=lot&sid=5511

To be fair, I must acknowledge that another very fine decadrachm sold for a higher price
Roma Numismatics auction 16 lot 221 (9.26.2018) : est. £ 50,000, hammer £ 40,000
This coin auctioned in 2022 : Roma Numismatics auction 25 lot 275 (9.22.2022) : est £ 75,000, hammer £ 60,000 (who was the buyer?...)

But it is true that none of these decadrachms is provenanced (the provenances in the descriptions are meaningless). That's the problem...

 

Thanks very much for this info! I agree, the latter Roma Provenances "From a private European collection" are essentially worthless.

It does appear that even Alexander dekadrachms of good & legal origin have really diminished in price.

Of course, the real tragedy is that the find was dispersed without any cataloging and attempts to learn the full history of the wreck. Further analysis would be add to our knowledge of these wonderful pieces as well as to the statues and the more common coins in the group.

Undoubtedly surplus coins could be sold by the authorities or their governments after analysis and the museums had their share. I doubt that the Gaza Strip would ever be able to effectively implement the kinds of laws that you see in the UK though.

If there was some sort of International Law modeled on the UK Treasure Act, this would be a great improvement though.

 

Of course, I agree with you, this is meaningless for most coins. But IMO it should be done for extremely rare coins suddenly surfacing by the dozens on the market, or for unique exceptional coins (like an aureus of Vabalathus for ex.).

 

In Gaza they have their own laws about this, based upon their traditional sharia (Islamic law). Roughly speaking, a hoard is the property of the person who buried it or of his heirs. If the hoard is too ancient and no one knows who buried it, it is the property of the land owner but a share of it must be given to the common treasury. If there is no private land owner, the hoard is the property of "the Muslims" (now interpreted as the State), and a share of it (25% I think) must be distributed to the people who were present at the discovery of the hoard.

In France the Napoleonic Civil Code (1803) states that a hoard must be divided 50 / 50% between the land owner and the person who found it. An additional law of 1941 (the Carcopino Law) states that if this hoard has an historical or archaeological interest (which is not the case with 19th or 20th c. gold coin-hoards, for ex.), it is public propriety and the state must give the land owner and the finder a fair financial compensation. Though nearly all Vichy-regime legislation was abolished and nullified by De Gaulle in 1944, this Carcopino law was preserved and is still valid.

 

I think they gave that up in the US and a few more places in 1898.