AD: Up to $100 if you can find a provenance!

I recently acquired a coin that I think is very likely to have an older provenance. I already tried ex-numis, with no luck. I know the coin sold from a retail shop called the Worldwide Treasure Bureau in 1996. Will pay $50 if you find a post 1970 provenance or $100 for pre 1970.

Information:
Sicily, Lilybaion
17.32 /33 grams

I

 

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Wow, absolutely beautiful coin!

 

Wonderful looking!

 

i just spent a roll of those playing pinball at golfland.no wait maybe those were qurters. hey cool coin.

 

You may want to search on
https://www.rnumis.com/
which scanned a fair number of old illustrated catalogues featuring Sicilian coins.
As a hint, search on the mint city and weight.
Good luck.
D

 

Yes, very likely the provenance is out there to be found. Often takes me a long time to discover new provenances for a coin like this if it doesn't immediately pop up in one of the easy sources. I look for all mine at once by just steadily flipping through the plates of every old catalog I can find (it works!). (There are at least 1,000s of pre-2000 [i.e., pre-ACSearch] catalogs online if not 10,000s.)

As @scarborough suggested, my first stop for Sicilian / Italian is rNumis' "The Provenance Project - Italy & Sicily" (a tremendous service that Steve Moulding seems to have basically donated -- I hope it stays that way!). The nice thing about it is the coins are listed by weight (you can also check by mint, yours would be under Sicily / Siculo-Punic, I believe).

Also, worth checking Jenkins. If you don't have his book, the articles are online: I think this would be in 1971. Coins of Punic Sicily, Part I. Schweizerische numismatische Rundschau. (There are three other parts.) In a quick glance at the plates I didn't notice yours, but there are others described, not plated, and yours might be among them if you find which dies are yours. You can track down many of the auctions listed.

I have started to collect 1990s FPLs & sale catalogs but don't seem to have any World Wide Treasure Bureau... this is a coin they'd surely want to have put in their print catalogs. I've seen some for sale at Forvm.

 

Lilybaion is a scarce city. ACSearch records just 290 tetradrachms. I don't know how many ex-Numis has in their pre-Internet database, but certainly less. Given that they failed, it is likely this didn't sell in a top-tier auction such as M&M or NFA.

Consult second-tier catalogs rhr ex-Numis doesn't use.

Worldwide Treasure Bureau was in California.

 

Thank you very much for the advice! Unfortunately, I didn’t have any luck with rNumis. What is the best place to find the pre-2000 catalogs online that you mentioned?

 

Where is the best place to find these catalogs online? Or are most of these only accessible by physical copies?

 

It takes a little practice with each site to figure out which firms' are available where and how to find them, including potential language obstacles (the two possibly best sites are in French & German).

With apologies to others for revealing some small secrets of internet provenance research (most inclined to do it either know or will find out, and it still takes work!):

BNF (Gallica) Online Catalog: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ (superb quality, some great coverage);
INHA Library (Bibliothèque de l’Institut national d’histoire de l’art):
https://bibliotheque-numerique.inha.fr/en/ (usually good quality, maybe not always);
Heidi: https://www.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/helios/digi/digilit.html (usually the best quality images and an interface that I find superior);
Internet Archive: https://archive.org/ (variable quality, sometimes w/ multiple copies for a single sale, sometimes including hand-named copies, giving further provenance leads, from the ANS collection or ANS-via-Hamelberg collection);
ACSearch Library: https://www.acsearch.info/library.html (maybe you need the free account, mostly decent reproductions);
Hathitrust: https://www.hathitrust.org/ (often bad image quality on plates);
And don't forget Google Books, though the image quality is usually low;
[Edit, good one @scarborough , below!] Newman Portal: https://nnp.wustl.edu/
[Edit, for recent catalogs from CNA, CNG, Berk, Gemini, others] Issuu: https://issuu.com/
Dealer sites/pdf archives: Several dealers include archives of pdf catalogs, some duplicating or linking to sites above: HJB (Berk), Numismatica Ars Classica (NAC), Kolner Munzkabinett Archives starting with Auktion 1 (1968). Lanz used to have many available, but they went away when the website was downsized. Some are still on Yumpu (or Yumpu German), though I don't like Yumpu (as are a few Gitta Kastner, the Lanz predecessor).

For some firms, like NFA, you may have to patch together a couple of those sources and still not have a complete run. For others, like the Naville - Ars Classica, you can find numerous copies of every single catalog spread across those sites. (But of variable quality and/or "bound together" with other catalogs if that's how the original was.)

I think many (most?) of the full-text/online catalogs linked by rNumis redirect to those sites.

Some sites are better than others. But I've so far reviewed and annotated somewhere between 1-2,000 of them for my own database (meant to ultimately be posted online as Steve does with rNumis, or McCabe and WWE with their annotated catalog collections) and haven't come close to exhausting what's available.

And beware that ancient coin auction catalogs and provenance hunting can literally become an all-day every-day addiction! But in the end, I find it's much cheaper than buying more coins w/ less research-per-coin, so I'm happy with it.

 

1. Thank you @Curtis for your list; I'll be bookmarking some of these suggestions.
2. While we're on the topic of provenance hunting
a) you may wish to consider the Newman portal: https://nnp.wustl.edu/ It does have limitations for ancients, but covers some auctioneers such as Malloy that one cannot readily find elsewhere
b) let me also suggest that you post (in their native language using Google translate) in a forum such as https://www.numismatikforum.de/ or https://www.lamoneta.it/. In particular, lamoneta has a very strong group specializing in the Sicilian series. I have found members there very helpful.
Good luck, and have fun.
D

 

Great coin! Definitely a good chance it has an old provenance out there.

 

$2,500 was a fairly decent price for it. I would buy one myself, but I already have this type! Congratulations

 

Yes, good one, I've added to this list above. I think the ones on NNP may all be on Archive as well, but once you get used to it the Newman organization can be much more useful. For instance, I'll go to the the page for, say, Stacks-Bowers and just start at the first year (1935, in this case) and work my way through every catalog one by one.... Then on to the next firm! Also great if you know you need to get to a particular catalog, say, The Michael F. Price sale, I'll just go the 1996 page for Stack's.

 

@kentuckycoins Very nice style and a great addition!

To find a provenance, I start with with attributing the coin. As @Curtis pointed out, Jenkins Coins of Punic Sicily is the THE reference for Siculo-Punic coins.

Your coin is the die type RShMLQRT (the Punic letters in the exergue) 69 (O24/R52) on plate 21. Obverse: quadriga galloping left with horses front feet close to exergual line, front of chariot appears to be on horses hindquarters and thick exergual line. Reverse: attractive style head of Persephone right and positions of the three dolphins match your coin.

Jenkins lists 15 examples - most can be eliminated as your coin because they are in museum collections or the weight is too low. Just to make sure, I checked the sales online using the sites already mentioned, like rnumis. So, not in Naville XII, Ratto24/6/1929, Martinetti Nervega (Sambon Cannessa), or Glendining Platt Hall. That leaves some without weights listed, like Sambon Canessa 22/6/1906 (doesn't appear to be online), Private collection Y (Jenkins's personal collection), Palermo (hoard?) and Megara Hyblaea 1967, ICGH 2180. I don't know where photos of the last 3 listing could be found. Also, there are a few more on acsearch (searched: Punic tetradrachm quadriga 69), but none match yours.

See? Isn't this fun? Your coin is attributed and several leads eliminated in a half hour. Now, the real work begins, especially since you already used exnumis.

Good luck finding the provenance.

 

Although your experience may differ, I've not had much success with commercial search companies. For example I tried exnumis for about 30 searches, all coins with enough value for auction, and they found only one new provenance. Also, I understand that many of the major sellers run their material through those searches prior to listing. However, as we've seen in an earlier CT thread, for some coins that one hit makes it all worthwhile.

 

I have only done test runs using the image searches available and I'm still skeptical of the success rate (though I have no doubt that every old provenance will become readily available at some point). I tried it with a coin I knew was illustrated in the Pozzi sale but wondered where it had been since, and the Pozzi record didn't come up. I also tried a little bronze from Prowe-Egger III with a distinctive edge chip, and they didn't catch that either.

Also, for most coins I suspect of having old provenances, I've already found one or more intervening sales, and don't want to pay the 25 or 50 eur or whatever if all they find are the ones I already know.

Honestly, I'd rather just see all the scans in their databases organized by mint or weight and manually check.

The technology should be really great for detecting certain forgeries too (that's where I expected to see it first). It seems like there's also great software for identifying die matches.

Once the tech gets there, I wonder if I'll feel all my hours & years of catalog searching were wasted. But I'm looking forward to learning how many coins being sold these days had lost century-old histories.

 

I tried Ex-Numis a few times with no luck as well, admittedly with Romans, but I later found 80s/90s provenances with some of them. For me it's not even worth the cost of submissions at this point since they never seem to find anything.

 

I agree with this statement 100%. That's a service I would pay for more willingly than image search.

 

@Curtis has given a good list of places to find online catalogs. However, you won't find many catalogs there.

Original catalogs before 1970 are "collectable". You can often buy them from numismatic booksellers.
Catalogs after 2000 are often online. (Although some important sales, like the Geminis, aren't.).
Catalogs from 1970 to 2000 are something of a hole in history. They are not online nor are the available to purchase. I recently picked up 174 catalogs from this period from an estate. Because these catalogs sell for less than shipping both ways and cataloging, numismatic book dealers often don't accept them. If you can find the right seller, stock up!

When I was trying to do a die study I went to the ANS library in New York City and flipped through physical catalogs. There was (and is) no other way to do it. Dr. Flueck from ex-Numis paid someone to scan his extensive catalog library.

I don't have catalog scans myself, and even if I did I couldn't make them available because of copyright reasons.

It can be frustrating. I bought a Celtic coin and it came with black and white photos that had been cut out in the shape of the coin for printing in a catalog. It is likely published somewhere, but I have no clue where!