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Message:: [QUOTE="John Anthony, post: 1835917, member: 42773"]I think that's an honest assessment of the matter, Pete. One of my areas of interest is coinage of the Arabian Peninsula, and I've bought quite a few Nabataean pieces from dealers in Israel and UAE. The dealers I buy from are legit in the sense that they process all the coins I get through the governmental antiquities export authorities. Sometimes the paperwork takes a long time - it's often months before I receive a coin I've purchased. But where do these dealers get their coins in the first place? Metal detectorists, where else? I would love to know the find locations of many of the pieces I own, but that information is sadly lost. In a perfect world, all those locations would have been recorded with the discovery of the coins. As a collector, do I encourage this dynamic? Absolutely, yes. But if there was no market for the coins, do you think they would do anything else but continue to rot in the ground? Do you think the various governments in the ME would send out thousands of archeologists to comb their lands and accurately record the discovery of every coin? It is what it is, and I believe that some numismatic scholarship is better than none. Who cares about their coins more than the collectors? Who studies them and conserves them and analyzes them more than the collectors? If it wasn't for us, ancient coins would all end up in the scrap pile.[/QUOTE]