Dr. Alan Walker of the ancient-coin firm Nomos in Switzerland https://nomosag.com/ occasionally writes about cultural heritage. He sent out this email and has given me permission to reproduce it here. Everything below the line is his words. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- THOUGHTS ABOUT CULTURAL HERITAGE AND COINS ︎ "HERITAGE" One of the present-day's biggest 'buzz' words in the cultural property world is heritage, which encompasses all the material (and immaterial) remains that are supposedly vital for helping make up a present-day people's/country's identity. As listed by the UNESCO Treaty of 1972, which was designed to protect them, these remains, all meant to be of exceptional importance, could be buildings, monuments and archaeological sites, or major works of art, or collections (both public and private) or, even, individual objects. (N.b., throughout this essay the term object will be used to describe anything covered by the UNESCO Treaty: a monument, a collection or a single item). This sounds fair and, even, reasonable; but is it? In fact, ever since, agreements meant to save truly important and significant things from either being destroyed within the country in which they were located, or illegally removed from that country, have metastasized and expanded into immense lists of items, very often of only the most limited, if not no, importance, that can neither be exported from a country without a permit, nor be imported into another country without considerable documentation. In addition, countries often seek the return of things (usually truly important ones, but increasingly often marginally important at best) that were taken long ago, regardless of how they were obtained. Two of the most famous and highly celebrated of those things, ones that almost everyone knows about, are the Acropolis Marbles (AKA the Elgin Marbles = the Parthenon Marbles - which were taken from a still-standing building in Athens and which, frankly, almost certainly should go back), and the Rosetta Stone, which was rescued, virtually in extremis, from destruction by a French army officer and only achieved its true importance outside of Egypt (and, thus, one might argue should stay in London, where it finally ended up). Both of these two "objects" are of overwhelmingly outstanding importance and are, thus, precisely the kind of "object" the UNESCO Treaty was meant to preserve and protect. The Acropolis Marbles are probably the most controversial group of ancient objects removed from their original location in modern times. They were torn from the slightly ruinous, but still standing, Temple of Athena Parthenos (the Parthenon) in Athens by the Scottish Lord Elgin from 1801 to 1812, under the cover of a legal permission document issued by the ruling Ottoman authorities (though the precise terms of that document have been debated ever since). The temple, and its artistically important ornamental sculpture had stood remarkably intact for over 2100 years: aside from the removal of the cult statue of the Parthenos (which was destroyed by fire in Constantinople at some point in the late first millenium), early Christians, who turned the building into church, did very little damage to the sculptural frieze and metopes; the 'Franks' also did little damage; and as for the Moslem Turks, very surprisingly, and unlike the Islamic extremists of today, they refrained from smashing the building's sculptures. Then, in September 1687 during the Siege of the Acropolis, the Venetians blew off the temple's roof (it had been used as a Turkish ammunition store); yet the building still stood and remained a part of the Athenian town/village-scape (the Venetians tried, but disastrously failed, to remove some surviving pedimental sculpture). Almost from the beginning of the Greek War for Independence (1821-1829/30) and the foundation of the Kingdom of Greece (1832), the Greeks have been trying, hitherto unsuccessfully, to get these Acropolis marbles back from Britain. The fact that these sculptures were taken, against the will of the local population and in violation of the terms of the Turkish permit of authorization, makes the case for repatriation a reasonable one. Admittedly, on the one hand, their being in London saved them from being damaged either by fighting during the Greek Revolution or by the severe atmospheric pollution emitted in the 20th century by industry in Eleusis; but on the other, the heavy cleaning they received in 1937-1938, thanks to pressure from Lord Duveen, was almost as disastrous. As for the Rosetta Stone, a stele bearing a trilingual inscription dating to 196 BC (in Egyptian Hieroglyphic, Egyptian Demotic and Ancient Greek), it was found, and its importance recognized, by a French army officer, Pierre-François Bouchard, in 1799, during work to strengthen and rebuild the somewhat dilapidated Fort Rashid (or Fort Qaitbay; renamed Fort Julien by the French). The stone was probably originally erected at a temple in the ancient city of Sais, but at some point was moved, probably after the closure of the pagan temples by Theodosius I in 392. When it was damaged (the rounded top of the stele and a considerable part of the hieroglyphic version of the text) is unknown, but in c. 1470 it was re-used as part of the building material for a fort erected by the Mamluk Sultan Qait Bay (1468-1496). In any case, had the inscription, and its importance, not been recognized the stele would have probably been broken up for building rubble. The 'stone' was acclaimed by the French savants who had accompanied Napoleon's expedition to Egypt; copies of the inscriptions were made and circulated; after the surrender of the French forces the stone was taken by the British and almost immediately put on display in what would become the British Museum, where it has remained until today. The decipherment of the hieroglyphic text - preceded by that of the demotic - was initially done by the Frenchman Jean-Françoise Champollion (1790-1832) with significant aid from the English polymath Thomas Young (1773-1829). At no point in this story did any actual Egyptian, whether Copt, Arab or Turk, have anything to do with the Rosetta Stone's recovery or decipherment. In summary, what we have here are two items that perfectly define the type of "object" that is ostensibly of great importance to the psyche of a modern country; thus, while on the one hand, a good case can be made for the return of the Elgin Marbles to Greece, but, on the other, an equally good case can be made for keeping the Rosetta Stone where it is in London. Unfortunately, in present-day debates over Cultural Heritage, the meaning of the word importance has been forgotten. ❖❖❖❖❖❖❖ We discussed the Acropolis Marbles and the Rosetta Stone because they are very obviously items of incredible cultural importance to the peoples of the states where they were made (and found): Greece and Egypt. However, as we shall see, the vast majority of items that have been described as being of cultural importance for a nation, or as being vital for a nation's heritage, very rarely are. This includes objects of all kinds, especially, as we shall see, coins. "PRICELESS" How often have you seen the word "priceless" used in describing anything sold by a reputable art, antiquity, book or coin dealer? Probably never, since everything put on the market, no matter how expensive, or inexpensive, actually has a price (i.e., it's not priceless). Where you do see it, in trade, is with people who aren't thinking, or are a bit, or very, shady! For example, "Thanks to a lucky purchase, these 'priceless' coins/artefacts/documents/etc. can be yours for ONLY $99.99!" Frankly, in most cases you should avoid things like that! However, there is another place where you often see the word 'priceless', and that is with certain archaeologists and governmental bureaucrats, when they are describing the terrible losses to knowledge caused by the art and coin trade. "If only these coins/this hoard/these artifacts had been found and properly excavated by trained specialists we would have had 'priceless information', etc., etc." Oddly enough, what they never say is what this priceless information might be. When we turn to coins, we often find that the only information we might gain from a properly excavated coin or one with a secure findspot is that the people living at the time the coins were made used them to buy things or as a store of value (something that our scholarly friends weren't sure about). Of course, if we were living in the 16th, 17th, 18th, or 19th centuries, when numismatic study was just developing, there would be many things we didn't know: like the mint that struck certain anepigraphic issues; or certain circulation patterns; or tribal boundaries; or accurate chronologies. But 500 years of numismatic observation and scholarship has meant that the information from findspots is now not as important as it was. Yes, it is true that a coin can be used to date an ancient structure if it is found in a sealed context - as in a foundation trench - but that coin can only provide truly accurate information if, a) you can identify it (if you don't know what it is it won't help), b) it was in nearly perfect condition when it was dropped (if it is you can assume that it was dropped soon after it was struck - see c - but if it is worn you can only be sure it was minted before the structure was built, but whether it was struck 10, 25, 50 or 100 years - or more - before construction you can not know) and c) it has been accurately dated. The great European scholars of the 19th and early 20th century built up a very secure chronological framework for most of the coinage struck in the West in ancient times (including the Mediterranean area, western, central and eastern Europe, the Near East, the Caucasus, Persia and the Greeks in India): in the British Museum Catalogues, the Traité, Historia Numorum, Grose's McClean Catalogues, et al. But some issues were just given general dates, like the span of c. 220-83 BC the BMC assigned to the Hellenistic bronze coinage of Athens; however, thanks to the careful excavation of the Athenian Agora all those coins could be given much narrower dates. In other words, the coins didn't help date the buildings, the buildings - otherwise datable - helped to precisely date the coins! This is all very interesting, but what, you might ask, does it have to do with Cultural Heritage? Good question! As we have said, the laws, whether MOUs or UNESCO treaties or whatever, that cover World Heritage include very long lists of items that are meant to be so important that their ownership, export and import need to be controlled. The most complete lists of this kind of heritage material can be found in the Memoranda of Understanding (or MOUs), on Archaeological and Ethnological Material, which have been established between the United States of America and a number of countries around the world (here is a convenient listing). Getting back to coins, lets look at three examples of coins that were confiscated in the USA and returned to their countries of origin (as we will see the term origin seems to mean a number things that are actually mutually exclusive: either where it was minted/made or where it was found). The first example, late Roman coins returned to Turkey, makes no sense; the second, certain very rare Greek coins returned to Greece, makes sense; but the third, while justified morally and emotionally, raises some disturbing questions. Quite recently, a Turkish reporter, Ms. N. Ertan, wrote an article in Al-Monitor about a number of important historical, heritage relics, which were recently returned, with great applause and eclat, to Turkey from Britain, Denmark, Switzerland and the US. The article's frontispiece is a photograph of a very important and seemingly life-size bronze head of Septimius Severus from Bubon (returned from Copenhagen); one can easily understand why the Ny Carlsberg wanted it for their collection, and we can equally understand why Turkey wanted it back (especially since the actual stone base for this statue seems still to be in situ)! However, the second photograph in this article makes it perfectly clear that the laudable desire to save TRULY IMPORTANT relics of a nation's past has, as used by bureaucrats, woke lawyers and rabid archaeologists, very definitely gone from the sublime to the ridiculous! The article's text, which accompanies that photograph, begins... At the Republic Museum in Ankara, 83 Roman coins gleamed under the lights at a handover ceremony on Sept. 29. Minted in Anatolia during the third- and fourth-century reigns of the Roman emperors Maximianus, Constantine I, Constantine II, and Arcadius, the coins had been seized in 2015 in the United States, and after a decade, were returned to Turkey under a 2021 bilateral agreement to protect cultural heritage. Deputy Culture and Tourism Minister Gokhan Yazgi received the artifacts from Brian Stimmler, charge d’affaires ad interim at the US Embassy. The photo, clear enough, shows us one side of 19 of those 83 gleaming coins: all are bronze ('AE'), none are gleaming (they all look 'as found'), and they seem to range in date from the teens of the 4th century (Constantine and Licinius) until the late 4th or early 5th century (Arcadius and what might be Theodosius II). They were confiscated (why??) in NYC in 2015 but it took ten years for them to be returned to Turkey (if, in fact, they were found there). Why did it take so long? How much did the whole process cost? What can we say about them? 1). Assuming that the 19 coins we see in the photo are representative of the entire 83, their average condition is decent but not outstanding and their total wholesale value, for all 83 of them, is approximately US$800. 2). They exhibit differing surface deposits, which suggests they were found in different places (there are reddish deposits on the coins as well as whitish ones: those are not found together; in fact, those reddish deposits are often, in my experience, found on coins coming from the Syro-Palestinian area, not Turkey). 3). Their chronological span of about 100 years, along with their differing 'patinas', makes it clear that they do not come from a single hoard; or a single place. They are, thus, a group of coins put together post discovery. 4). The statement in the article - presumably derived from the able scholars in the USA, who identified the coins for the American authorities, as well as by their Turkish colleagues - that all the coins were "minted in Anatolia" depends on one's definition of the term 'Anatolia'. The coin that is second from the right on the top row bears the mint mark TSΓ (see RIC VII, pp. 498-499, 4-5), which stands for the Greek name of what became the Turkish city that was, from c. 1430 to 1912, known as Selânik (it was Atatürk's birthplace). It is now better known as Thessaloniki, which is in Macedonia in Greece, not in Anatolia. Also not from Anatolia, not by a long shot!, is the yellowish coin, with the camp gate reverse, in the middle of the second row, which bears the mint mark R P (and a dot in the arch of the gate): this coin was minted in ROME, which is, last time we checked, in Italy, not Turkey (RIC VII, p. 325, 264 (b). Aside from these two coins from very non-Anatolian mints, the photographs give us no hint as to what the other "Anatolian mints" might be. One little fact that is worth mentioning is that Antioch - one of the great mints of the East and now in Turkey, only became Turkish, and not Syrian, in 1938; and that vast quantities of coins minted in Antioch - in Greek, Roman, Byzantine and Medieval times - are commonly found in Syria, Lebanon and Israel, not to mention Turkey. 5). These very common coins have no historic, artistic or archaeological importance (i.e, their types are already known and published, and they have no known, secure findspot) 6). As they are, these coins could be used as teaching material for students in secondary school or at universities (their inscriptions are in fairly easy-to-read Latin letters, and no amount of mishandling - or loss - would be of any significance). 7). These coins very definitely do not tell modern Turks who they are and are completely superfluous for Turkish heritage. After all, they were standard Roman Imperial issues, with types that were in use all over the Empire. 8). Thus, it is actually somewhat insulting for an American chargé d'affaires to proudly claim that returning these wildly common coins from New York City to Turkey is a major victory in the fight to protect Turkey's heritage, given how many thousands of similar pieces are, presumably, already in public and private collections in Turkey. ✲✲✲✲✲ For another recent example of items returned to their country of origin by the American authorities, we can look at this group from New York: From the photograph, we can see that the antiquities are primarily terracottas, none of which seem to be of any importance whatsoever (and none of the large ones are in good condition), and undoubtedly duplicate pieces that have long been in Greek museums. There were also unillustrated coins: "...alongside 25 ancient coins, including silver coins from Rhodes...particularly notable are two rare 4th-century BC coins: a bronze coin from Macedonia depicting Persephone and a hydra, and a gold stater from Lampsacus featuring Heracles and Pegasus." Turning to the rare coins: the Macedonian bronze coin is actually from an uncertain city named Apollonia (there were three in Macedonia: which one of them this coin is from is uncertain). Coins of this type began appearing on the market in 2009 (as CNG MBS 81, 2009, 266; CNG e267, 2011, 56; CNG e269, 2011, 26; CNG 90, 2012, 406; CNG 91, 2012, 108; Roma e37, 2017, 120; etc.). It is a very interesting coin, indeed and is almost certainly lacking from most Greek public or private collections. Returning it to Greece, where it will presumably enter the collection of the Numismatic Museum in Athens is fair enough. As for the rare gold stater from Lampsacus, well, there seems to be absolutely accurate evidence that this coin was found in Greece, so while the mint of Lampsacus is actually in Turkey, not Greece, sending it back to Greece also makes perfect sense. In any case, the Numismatic Museum in Athens will be very happy to have this coin (Baldwin published two staters from Lampsacus bearing heads of Herakles on their obverses: B15, with his head in a lionskin - a unique piece in Berlin; another - this one??- first went unsold in GoMo 232, 2015, 263 and then unsold in Pecunam 39, 2016, 281; or B31 = BMFA 1596, as Omphale - as Heritage 3101, 2022, 34033). To reiterate, the fact that both of these coins were definitely found in Greece, combined with their rarity and interest, makes their return to Greece totally understandable. Now for another case that is much more ambiguous: Two spectacular coins were seized in New York City and returned, as "stolen" to Israel. The first is one of those famous small bronzes of Mattathias Antigonos that bear a Menorah on the obverse and the Showbread Table of the Temple on the reverse. This is probably the most important and evocative of all Jewish coins and has a great symbolic and emotional power. It virtually has to have been found in Israel, and since it seems not have any official export papers (from Israel or anywhere else), sending it back to Israel is fully understandable. The second coin is even more exciting: it is a silver tetradrachm of Athenian type. It has a helmeted head of Athena in the style of the 430s BC on the obverse (but with the olive leaves replaced by wadjet eyes), and a facing owl - with spread wings in the style of the earlier dekadrachm - on the reverse. This coin was minted in the ancient city of Ashkelon, on the Mediterranean coast south of Tel Aviv. It's return to Israel would be uncontroversial if, as is stated, there is real evidence that it was found in, and smuggled from, Israel. But was it? It is bright, shiny, and sharply struck and nearly perfect, very much unlike the surfaces we see on ancient Greek silver coins found in Israel, but just like the surfaces on all the actual Athenian tetradrachms that have turned up in very large numbers since the late 2010s (and are definitely not from Israel). This group also contained silver tetradrachms from other ancient cities. While I am perfectly happy to have it end up in Israel (where it has enormous significance), I strongly doubt that there is any real evidence that it was found there.
I have made it to But Is It? That stirred my pot. I have things about what I read that concern me. I will read on as soon as I get the chance. Sorry Ribs on the Grill Soon.....
