Roman coins seized in Peru

If true, things are getting crazy. Very few details from this article, however, to know how these coins were obtained:

Peru on March 9 returned a collection of 73 Roman coins, some from the second and fourth centuries, to the Italian embassy in Lima, the Foreign Ministry said.

The coins were seized from a Peruvian woman in 2021 at the international airport in Cusco, a tourist hub and gateway to the world renown Machu Picchu Inca citadel.

Peru’s deputy foreign minister, Ignacio Higueras, told reporters that the collection of 73 coins “are part of Italian heritage.”
Higueras said the “valuable collection is made up of 42 coins from the imperial Roman era of the second and fourth centuries.”

“The coins have great historical and cultural value,” D’sibio told AFP, also praising international cooperation in “the fight against illicit trafficking in cultural assets.”



https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/peru-returns-seized-roman-coins-to-italy-181492

 

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..sounds (and looks) like a small private collection of not very rare coins...i got my Didius Julianus from down that way from Rio De La Plata..

 

I am against the idea of cultural assets, or cultural property.

 

This sort of thing makes me tired. Putting aside the question as to whether or not the coins were illegally obtained (and my bet is that they were not), can we at least stop pretending that every single ancient coin is somehow a sacred and indispensable part of a country's heritage? I guarantee that the Italian government has literally hundreds, probably thousands of identical coins currently locked away in storage. Yet they can't let anyone else own a few??

What drives me up the wall about all these stories is that everyone involved is acting like they're somehow great heroes, proudly posing for the cameras. If they just had a peanut's worth of honesty and knowledge about ancient coins they'd realize how foolish they look.

Oh well...

 

Looks like they probably spent $50,000 on travel, legal issues, display materials, and press conferences over $2000 worth of common coins. Pretty smart.

 

This is the very height of idiocy.

 

Well, there is definitely a line when it comes to these things, but these coins aren't anywhere near that line.

It's not something that I'm gonna go out of my way to protest, but I certainly empathize with Greeks and Egyptians wanting the Parthenon Marbles and Rosetta Stone back from British museums. Even if it's not a matter of cultural rights and so forth, there is the commercial value of these items that were essentially stolen from their countries of origin.

If the British had managed to snatch the Declaration of Independence when they burned the capital in 1814, as an American, I'd probably detest having to cross an ocean to look at it!

But ya, these coins..... not even in the same ballpark.

 

my gramps dug up ancient ruins in mex in the 50s and back then it was legal for the president to reward archeologists with gifts from within for their hard work and dedication.any body wanna buy a watch?

 

I can't speak to the irreplaceable cultural value of all of the pictured coins, but I doubt the 10 centimes from 189? and the "Republica Italiana" coin fall into that category.

 

Just to add to the stupidity, many of the coins in that photo are not even ancient! The gloved hand is holding what looks like a medieval Venetian coin (or one of the many that imitated the Venetians), and another Venetian-style is also visible on the right. Even worse, on the bottom of the photo, there's a copper 10 centesimi from the 1890s, and a silver 500 lire of the type that was issued from 1958 to 2001! So 2001 is now considered "ancient" and coins from that time are "part of Italian heritage" that can't be allowed to leave the confines of Italy without irreparable damage to the culture?

 

I’d guess the Peruvian authorities would love to get back the treasures looted by Europeans over the centuries.

 

..much ado about nothing..

 

Alot less protected and cherished pieces i believe.

 

Yeah what he said and where's all the shrunkin heads.a good relic bust always includes some shrunkin heads dont it.

 

I got that same lot out of the reject slot in a coinstar machine in Walmart. I should go into hiding and put tinfoil on my windows so they can't find me.

 

At first sight this looks stupid. What will the Italians do with these very common modern and ancient coins w/o any provenance?

 

This is just another example of politicians making it look like they're doing something worthwhile. It reminds me of when ebay once called me to pull one of my listings that offered a coin from Mesopotamia. Apparently that word raised a red flag in the system because selling stuff from Iraq is verboten. Meanwhile, have you seen the cesspool of fakes and scams that is ebay? Lol.

 

You may be right: the very word Mesopotamia must have automatically "raised a red flag". But it is understandable. Since 2003 and the fall of Iraq's authoritarian regime, a certain form of anarchy has prevailed in this country. For antiquities, it has been a disaster, starting from the looting of Baghdad's National Museum in full daylight. There have been illegal digs everywhere and tons of antiquities of all kinds (coins, pottery, cylinders, fragments of statues or reliefs, etc.) have been proposed to potential buyers on internet. In the 2000s it's no longer like in the 1970s, when such items were only available in Baghdad or Mosul antique shops, or on the very sites where locals used to propose them to the few tourists or expats; now traffickers can immediately reach customers from the whole planet by the tens of thousands thanks to social networks or sites like ebay.
Ebay could be sued for this, because it facilitates trafficking of looted heritage and even makes money from it. They must do something, and the least they can do is banning any antiquity that has words like Mesopotamia, Sumerian, Iraq, Syria, etc. in its description so it is easy to find with a simple word search. Of course it's awkward, but much less than all these security checks we have to go through when we travel by plane, or the prohibition of carrying any liquid items with us - just because there are sometimes a handful of terrorists.