Bells Jingle for Numismatic Shopkeepers

Jingle Bells - Christmas is approaching ("The holiday season is approaching...") and the dealers in ancient dugups are getting their shops ready for the present-buying. Dealer Dave Welsh's  Classical Coins website is no exception, his "new listings" page [as it is today] has a whole load of round shiny things with pictures and writing to collect by catalogue number. A hundred and twenty one to be exact. He says listing his new acquisitions  gave him pleasure: 

it has been a refreshing and very pleasant change to focus on Classical Coins again, instead of being bothered by Barfy's bilious blather.

That seems an odd thing to say on a blog "about" ancient coins. Really, nobody forces him to accord a single word there to "Barford's billious blather".

[It really cracks me up to see those folk over the sea bending over backwards to call Christmas "the holiday season" as though there was only one and then pay each other with bills bearing the All-Seeing-Eye of God and the motto "in God we trust".] 

Anyway, it is worth looking through this group of material and comparing the manner in which they are presented with what Mr Welsh has been saying down the years about the coins he sells. The first thing one notes is that some of them are in awful condition. Welsh has all along stressed that "coins found with metal detectors are not saleable", that dealers only want coins from sealed deposits hoards.  While there are some coins in a condition suggesting that was where they were found (not a single one of which has that information in the sales spiel, let alone which documented hoard they came from) there are coins there with patinas looking like metal detecting finds. There are coins with "porous" surfaces, and I think I saw at least one tooled coin there. Of the 121 coins offered, only 13 have a one-stage collecting history - referring to commercial source rather than archaeological provenance ("ex. Kritt" - presumably the author of "Seleucid Coins of Bactria", Lancaster, 1996) and one more "ex. Bernobich" [the name of a dealer]. All the rest have absolutely no collecting history offered. What is offered for the fourteen that do is of course totally insufficient as any form of legitimisation, as an indication of legal excavation and legal export.  So, where did these coins come from? The only group of items offered by this dealer that have any kind of source given, a group of coins from a "hoard" said to have been discovered in "Israel",  is not from Israel at all, that is a commercial untruth.

There are several groups of coins which look as if they also were obtained together as bulk buys from some kind of a group find. The seven potins of the "Leuci" for example. When where and by what means were these coins exported? Then a group of coins from Selge in Pisidia (modern Antalya Province, Turkey where the looted sarcophagus came from). How did they reach California? The same goes for the five small silver units of Persian rulers issued in Samaria (note the source).

We can look at the places where some of them were issued. This is hindered a little by a certain lack of exactness in citing the mintmarks by the dealer. In several cases no attempt was made to differentiate between two different mints of the same name, and in order to plot them, one has to look up which ones were used for which issues. Some of the Roman mintmarks are not given by the dealer, and the photos are too fuzzy to make all of them out, so some of Welsh's Late Roman bronzes are not plotted on this map. Blue is 'Greek' stuff, red is 'Roman' and yellow is Arab-Sasanian (conventionally p[lotted on the south of the Arabian peninsula, they were probably dug up well to the northwest). Likewise the 'Parthian' coins are plotted in Parthia but of course circulated much more widely. The dark Green area is the Roman Empire, light green is roughly the Seleucid empire within which the 13 coins in the big blue cluster circulated.

The clustering of origins of these coins is quite notable, from the west is a Macedonian/Thessalonian cluster, then a Bulgarian/ Thracian (incl. Heraclea Thracica) cluster, a notablenorthwester Turkey cluster, a couple from Cilicia and the area of modern Syria/Lebanon, and then a whole bunch from Palestine. Over to the east are 145 Seleucid and Parthian coins (Mr Welsh has in his time handled quite a lot of Parthian coins) and two Arab-Sassanian issues (yellow).

So how did all these coins reach Mr Welsh in Goleta, California? Apart from the ones which tell us they were bought from Mr Kritt and another giving a dealer's name, there is not a clue from the sales spiel. I am sure Mr Welsh would like us to believe these are "from old collections", but then this is not really an explanation for the bulk groups referred to above. Some of the silver coins look very freshly cleaned. One can search the listings in vain for the words 'cabinet-toning'.  There really is nothing here to say when these coins left the ground, and when and how they left the source country. It will be noted that several of the regions where these clusters occur are suffering today from heavy looting. The fact that one of these mints is in modern Syria, 25 km to the SW of Homs I would have thought would be added incentive for the responsible dealer to come up with some information when it left that currently war-torn region. I guess Dealer Dave Welsh assumes that none of his clients will want to ask.  Did the Seleucid coins come from Syria? When? Were the coins from Palestine smuggled into Israel and exported through Jerusalem? When and how?

I am sure Mr welsh will come up with some kind of reassuring words about why his coins are 'kosher' which he somehow forgot to include in the sales spiel. I am equally sure that all of us that care about the preservation of the past would like to hear that.

UPDATE 11.11.13:
... when he can find time between making insulting posts about people ('Fanatical Flatulence from Archaeo-Grinches', Monday, November 11, 2013). Certainly I think it is better to be a so-called archaeo-grinch than an archaeology pincher. Does Mr Welsh know any archaeology pinchers?