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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;GinoLR, post: 24565602, member: 128351&quot;]More seriously, in the Middle East when a hoard is found and secured by the authorities, they sometimes make an inventory and stick on each coin a small adhesive label with the inventory number written on it.</p><p><br /></p><p>This is what the Museum of Gaza did when they first counted a hoard of owls, just like yours. Removing these tags left on the coins some sticky substance which had to be cleaned with lots of acetone.</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1557156[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1557157[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>Of course, I suppose these pieces of adhesive cloth would not be stuck on coins going to be proposed for sale. It&#039;s purely... administrative.</p><p><br /></p><p>The coins were hoarded in a pottery which has been exposed to a fire, and a few of them have been burned. They bear the mark of this fire, like this one:</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1557162[/ATTACH] </p><p><br /></p><p>This hoard was discovered in 2010 in Rafah, just next to the Egyptian border. The Palestinian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities could act very quickly and secure the whole of it. They roughly cleaned the coins and made an inventory, sticking these terrible little labels on each one, and counted a total of <b>1427</b> coins, all in silver, small (drachms) and large (tetradrachms). But when archaeologists came in 2012 to make a more scientific inventory, there were <b>only 1216</b> coins in the museum safe or in the displays: 863 drachms and 353 tetradrachms. The drachms were very homogenous, all 863 were struck from only 5 different obverse dies, obviously a local minting, some being overstruck on Edomite dome-shaped coins. The tetradrachms were more diverse: the majority were probably bona fide Athenian pi-styles with no test-cuts, some where early 4th c. (even a die-link with a tetradrachm of the Sicilian Lentini hoard), some where Buttrey and Buttrey-Flament types from Egypt, a handful were probably bona fide classic owls of the late 5th c. The hoard may probably be dated between 353 and 343 BC.</p><p><br /></p><p>What about the missing 211 coins? Of course nothing official could be said about that, but everybody knows they have been given as a reward to different people involved in the discovery. In the 2010s several drachms from the same obverse dies as the 863 others have been proposed on the market : at least we can be 99% sure they came from this hoard. For the tetradrachms it is not possible to be that sure, but some that have hit the market in the same years may very well come from this hoard.</p><p><br /></p><p>I would not be surprised if it was the case with your specimen. Some of the people who were involved in this hoard discovery, inventory, etc. have links with Turkey, at least 2 of them live there now. Turkey is a well-known hub for antiquities from the Syrian and Mesopotamian war zones, but also from Palestine. I don&#039;t know if you remember the Greek life size bronze statue (&quot;Apollo of Gaza&quot;) found in 2013 and immediately spirited away. Last time I heared of it, it was rumored in Turkey.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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