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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Curtis, post: 6409912, member: 26430&quot;]I would feel pretty confident there must be a lot more evidence than given in the email. (At least enough that CNG felt like conceding quickly without a fight, since this must&#039;ve come up after the sale opened.) If you read the prior paragraph, it sounds like Yale knows exactly what the coins are and where they came from: &quot;six coins in Keystone 3 came from an excavation sponsored by Yale University at Dura-Europos between 1928 and 1937.&quot;</p><p><br /></p><p>Perhaps not photographed, but they seem to recognize them. Sure sounds like these were coins they have known went missing and have been keeping an eye out for (in the sense of being specifically recorded as missing, not continuously investigating for 85-90 years!). But not just that they saw the pedigree at CNG and couldn&#039;t find their own records of de-accession.</p><p><br /></p><p>Could&#039;ve happened in any number of ways. Someone working on the excavation took some coins home &amp; lost them, then died and they were sold at an estate sale. Or stolen by a grad student working on an archaeology article. I imagine many of us will be learning more details from CNG staff in the upcoming days, as some of us may be pestering friends &amp; contacts there for details!</p><p><br /></p><p>Lastly, I happen to have a much more positive view of institutional collections, in principle, than a lot of ancient coin collectors. Fairly frequently I use both qualitative and quantitative research and reference catalogs based on these collections, all of which would be much harder to produce without such collections, in addition to reviewing their online exhibits. (Though admittedly, the advance of information technology is now making it possible to perform much of that research based on commercial records.) So, even though I was planning to bid on as many of those coins as possible, I feel no bitterness toward Yale for wanting to re-claim what they considered their property.</p><p><br /></p><p>This is partly why I think it&#039;s important to incentivize (i.e., &quot;pay more for&quot;) pedigree/provenance on the private market. Having the most complete record possible can turn out to be quite beneficial. (Though of course there are circumstances like [USER=74282]@red_spork[/USER] &#039;s where the record will be broken, despite valiant efforts to restore it.)[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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