I bought an Owl a few years ago and decided to sell it last year and apparently the price dropped... a LOT. I heard that there was some sort of hoard found...?
I know HA keep selling some at most of their ancients auctions. Depends on the condition and what you paid for it but a very nice AU* with excellent strike and metal is now around $1,500 or thereabouts. I purchased one a few months back (AU* 5 and 5) because I thought....I MUST have one of those in my collection.....but with the frequency with which dozens are flooding the market, I could easily have waited. Having said that a specimen with full earrings and almost full crest is not easy to come by And quite a well fed owl
If I remember correctly it was rumors that the hoard , about half ton was found in 2018 . And claim that this is a picture of part of that hoard
WOW half a ton is a lot of owls. I think the plastic bag is reason why they were so well preserved On a serious note, the coin on top of the pile and slightly to the left is one worth having......broad flan, full crest and earrings. What more can one ask for
I believe not all the owls , staters too , but I don’t know what kind. Most of the hoard was bought by dealer or dealers from US . Some was sold by few German dealers over the internet.
I had heard the hoard was 30,000, so that math supports that rumor. I also heard that a big part was not Athenian tets but a lot of staters from elsewhere.
I saw LOTS of owls in European (German) auctions this last year. Many in better, some in less condition. I'm not much into Athenian coins, but if one was cheap and beautiful, why not: a top classical type! Just like the huge Koson gold stater treasure: a beautiful coin in good condition, prices drop... It's best to wait, sit poised, bide your time and keep a bit of money in your pocket.
There are a lot of unanswered questions here. Where was the hoard found? When was it found? Who could have secreted the coins away? What coins other than the owls were included? Why wasn't this a big news story? Was the public kept in the dark so as not to start a panic and a general decline in the value of the issues found?
Yes, to everything. Of course the coins are genuine because the city was being invaded and a ton of brand new owls was saved for some lucky farmer to stumble upon at $1000 + each. Otherwise, perhaps these were carried along to pay for the soldiers as they passed the Black Sea. LOL. I'm just a born skeptic.
I heard 25,000 in the hoard. They seem to be trickling it out so the prices don't drop too drastically. Still, a "trickle" with that many is a lot! What does this mean? The earring is in the middle of the die...
Yeah, it seems like every major auction has like 20 of them these days though. I'm not sure how many you'd see per auction pre-hoard, but that seems like a lot.
As with most hoards there probably won't be any definite answers to these questions shared publicly. You can thank the cultural property zealots for that.