Featured Questions about Provenance

All people have to do is be prepared to spend money on books that they would otherwise earmark for coins. It isn't rocket science, just hard work, lots of reading and patience. Taking care that the lot description is correct is also important because auction notices aren't a new thing. Pristine catalogues are nice, but tatty ones with lots of hand scribbled notes are much better and far more valuable for the detective.

The American obsession with slabbing creates a bit of problem with provenances because any tickets often get thrown away once the coin is entombed. Tickets are a valuable source of provenance because every collector will record the details differently and in a different hand. This makes the job a lot harder.

For British coins, an article by Robin Eaglen in the 2001 BNJ illustrated tickets for a good number of collectors. For collectors of other material, there may be a similar publication, but it doesn't come within my collecting sphere.

Illustrated catalogues didn't really appear until the back end of the 19th century, and then only for some of the major collections, and then only for the best pieces in that collection. Prior to that you really are dependent on annotated sale catalogues, or a ticket with pertinent info.

Sometimes it is possible to identify irregular coins from the wood carving blocks used for illustrating old books, but usually only for the coins that are known to be rare. With milled coinage you are on a hiding to nothing.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide this ad.

Excellent thread, @R*L ! Many of my Judaean coins were ordered from dealers in Israel. My favorite Israel VCoins dealer is Alexander Wolfe company in Jerusalem. They are a superb and trustworthy dealer but don't hold your breath while waiting for your order. It can take 6 to 8 weeks due to the period of time the orders take to be processed and approved by the Israel Antiquities Authority. The export document that you will receive is excellent proof of provenance because they won't allow any coins or artifacts that are suspected to have been looted from archeological sites to be shipped out of the country.

 

@SeptimusT : What a nice coin! It was also in the Peus auction, wasn't it?

I have a small theory on this but can't fully prove it: Hommel regularly used his private collection in his teaching at Tübingen university. In his obituary, Hommel's pupil Eberhard Heck mentions this: "Hommel established numismatics as a field of research and teaching at Tübingen. He used his private collection for numismatic seminars, liked to bring coins to oral exams, and in 1959 established a numismatic research center" (Eberhard Heck: Hildebrecht Hommel, in: Gnomon 69,7 (1997), pp. 651–656, cit. pp. 655f; translated from the German). If you look at pictures of Hommel's collection as the one below (from the Peus catalogue), you can see that there are tags apparently written by a number of different hands. The style of these tags is more 'official' than the format he used for the tags made by himself. Maybe Hommel had his academic assistants and/or students re-tag parts of his collection for teaching and research purposes?

 

The explanation is much simpler. The Hommel collection, like Trau and Stöcklin, was a multi-generational family collection. There was more than one collector! Fritz Hommel (1854-1936) started the collection. Prof. Hildebrecht Hommel (1899-1996) expanded the collection. Archaeologist Peter Hommel (1925-2012) inherited the collection, but didn't expand it. In addition, Professor Hommel had his secretary assist with managing his collection, so some of the tags may also be in the Professor's secretary's hand.

 

The company is ex-numis.com I haven't had good results with them. I submitted photos of 10 ancient coins; some of which were a little higher end like a gold aureus of Otho. None of these were the run of the mill common ancients. They found the provinance for only 1 coin: a really superb denarius of Galba, BUT the provinance was only for 6 months before I bought the coin 20 years ago and have the provinance since then.

Good news is that I bought the coin from H.J. Berk, whom I always suspected of always overcharging me. Turns out he bought the coin at auction 6 months before he sold it to me & then only charged a reasonable markup.

 

As fakes get better, provenance becomes more important.

For British middle Anglo-Saxon coins, the excellent work by Rory Naismith catalogs just about all of the extant coins (at the time of publication). Makes provenance research a snap.

Obviously this is only possible when coins are overall rare enough to have a manageable amount of surviving specimens. And of course when someone goes to the trouble of researching all of them.

 

The first thing that came to mind is the slabbed Binion hoard of silver dollars? Technically they came from the ground

 

The only "pedigreed" coins I have that come to mind are one "From the BCD Collection; ex Dr. Walter Kimpel, December 1975." and a few others that had collection tags/cards rather older than I am. Aside from one's expectation that an ex-collection coin is both authentic and desirable enough to have been afforded a spot in someone's collection I don't really care and wouldn't pay a premium for it, unless it was something actually special like Roosevelt's pocket-piece tetradrachm which helped inspire some of the finest US coins ever minted, or a coin from a particularly noteworthy ancient hoard. Whether or not a coin has a provenance (recorded discovery place and/or chain of custodianship) it doesn't usually change the facts regarding what can be gleaned from the coin itself and aside from alleviating concerns regarding authenticity shouldn't be more than an ancillary factor influencing value.

That stated, lots of people can be sold on the idea that pedigreed coins are more valuable, which is a great boon to dealers whose job it is to squeeze every shekel they can out of their inventory. Hype is profitable and human beings are inherently manipulable, so if a fancy story about some dead collector who once owned this coin or looked at that coin makes the piece more personally and emotionally relatable to some and thus adds a premium to the hammer price then more power to the dealers who exploit lucrative human idiosyncrasies, but I'm not interested in being subjected to such transparent marketing strategies myself.

Where provenance (location of discovery, not so much whose hands it passed through) is much more fundamental regarding value is with artifacts which do not generally benefit from being conveniently emblazoned with legends pinpointing their temporal and geographic origins.

 

I couldn't disagree more with regard to impact on value and desirability of higher-quality coins. In the U.S. and in some other countries, freedom to import and export ancient coins is gradually eroding under increasing government regulation and the regular threat of more difficult regulations. Verifiable provenance before the effective dates of these regulations adds great value by exempting the coin from the restrictions. Further, the 1970 provenance cutoff of the UNESCO convention impacts most museums and academic institutions, making coins with verifiable, pre-1970 provenances more valuable still. Finally, the knowledge that a great collector or collectors have owned a coin adds value to many of us that appreciate connoisseurship. So, while you don't see the value in a provenance, many of us feel differently and will pay a premium for coins with provenance. "Ancillary" in this case could be 20-30% premium.

 

I for one will pay more for a coin that has a verifiable provenance. I have a number of coins that fall under this category and I feel lucky to have acquired them. Provenance is becoming more and more important because of the regulations @Carausius wrote about and so having a chain of custody, so to speak, is important. However, just as important to me is the idea that someone notable has owned the coin before. All coins have stories and knowing who owned the coin adds to the story of it. When we buy a coin with a provenance we are also buying the associated stories. Since my collecting interests are mostly historical, story is an important factor both in terms of the story that the obverse and reverse tell and the story told by a chain of ownership.

 

Fair enough, I'm not a "high-end" collector and don't claim to speak for those of you who are. I may think Beanie-Babies are worthless but many who are heavily invested in them will disagree with that assessment, no big deal, I just won't participate. Perhaps my perspective is a function of being a merchant myself, and while I have no problem hyping a good story for extra money I have no interest in paying a premium over retail for someone else's story. That's what consumers are for, lol.

The imposition of external restrictions like you speak of is an inorganic or unnatural factor which creates artificial scarcity, and while I'm certain that prices will become inflated for those artificially scarce items, I'm just as certain that it will incentivize creative schemes to circumvent those restrictions, by inventing entire collections "owned" by professors or doctors dead too long to contradict and whose estates were recorded as having been auctioned off decades ago, from which these "collections" were most assuredly obtained, along with convincing yellowed new-old-stock collection cards written with a few different fountain pens. It's like the "From an old German collection formed prior to >insert date<" sort of claims for freshly excavated antiquities or "collectible token" being the declared contents of an Umbrian Aes Grave shipped from Italy. Until such workarounds are entirely shut-down, it seems silly from an amoral practical standpoint to pay much more than necessary for fundamentally interchangeable items.

 

Really, we are talking apples and oranges here. You are describing seller scams. I am describing verifiable auction provenances. The unverifiable, generic provenance ("Ex Collection of a French Chef") will not add value and will not provide safe haven from regulation. Verifiable auction provenances will do both. By " verifiable", I mean that the coin appears in the plates of an old auction catalogue, or the plates or detailed line drawings of a book. Hard to lie about that -
either the coin is there or it's not.

 

It seems the threat of regulation is something I haven't truly taken seriously. My instinct is to react to infringements on rights to personal property with immediate dismissal, but you've succeeded in impressing upon me the importance of provenance within the context of ever-increasing restrictions to the hobby. I may not like it and regard it all as artificially imposed and burdensome but that doesn't change anything. My apparently weak and unpopular point was simply that of 2 interchangeable coins, I'll take the cheaper one without provenance over the more expensive one from a liquidated collection, as the only collection I really care about is my own. I meant no offense by expressing this.

 

No offense taken, and I hope I did not come across as offended in my replies. We are each entitled to our opinions and to collect in the manner and at the price points we desire. I simply wanted to impress the reasons why provenanced coins do command a premium and are likely to continue to command a premium.

 

Carausius, thank you for expressing your position, and if it isn't too much bother, is there a good central resource for reviewing the current international laws and regulations influencing the ancient coin and antiquities trade?

Also, are you stating that the only completely "safe" coins are those that were specifically illustrated in books or catalogs with initial ownership records dating prior to 1970? Hopefully I'm misinterpreting you because that sounds very alarming!

 

I'm not aware of any central resource. You can find information on Peter Tompa's blog "Cultural Property Observer". There used to be summaries of some of the U.S. import restrictions on CNG's webpage. There are likely some descriptive posts on the Forum Ancient Coins discussion board.

Also, if you want to follow the cultural property debate and help fight against restrictions on our ability to collect ancient coins, consider joining the Ancient Coin Collectors Guild.

No, didn't mean to imply that. There are various provenance dates needed to meet various hurdles. If you are hoping to donate or sell your collection to a museum or academic institution, then pre-1970 provenance would be required. Assuming you live in the U.S., if you are importing coins from overseas, you would need either provenance before the effective dates of certain Memoranda of undertsanding that the U.S. State Department has entered into with various source countries or export permits from those source countries. For ancient coins of "Italian Type" that is a provenance before 2011. For ancient coins of mainland Greece, I think it's 2007. There are also MoUs with Bulgaria, Egypt, etc. These are only import restrictions. If you live in the U.S and are buying coins only from U.S. dealers, then you need not worry about import restrictions. Even then, I'd recommend you keep detailed purchase records, invoices and dealer tags for all ancient coin purchases in case more restrictive laws are enacted in the future.

 

Wonderful, thank you taking the time to collate the info, I've got some homework to do!