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Message:: [QUOTE="GinoLR, post: 8090843, member: 128351"]Half a century ago the Western dealers from London or the USA would have cooperated with scholars. For example when the "1973 Iraq (or Near Babylon) Hoard" hit the market in London, the auction house immediately told numismatists. The hoard could be analyzed and published by Otto Mørkholm, Martin Price, Peter Van Alfen. A large part of it could be bought for public collections like ANS or British Museum, and these coins can now be studied by scholars. Now, look what happens. An enormous hoard of thousands of coins is being dispersed on the market, nobody knows where it was found, how many coins there are, which ones precisely... Of course this is because now laws exist that protect the countries' archaeological heritage. If the find-place was known, the local government would logically claim property of the coins. So the "professional numismatists" (= dealers, auctioneers) face a dilemma: science or profit. Well, the choice is obvious, isn't it? This is the new obscurantism. In the Middle Ages they burnt books (sometimes authors too) and defaced works of art in the name of religions. Today the universal religion on which everybody, Christian, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Atheists are in total agreement, is profit. Please don't ban me ! But I could not resist.[/QUOTE]