Collectors and their Notorious Inability to Profit from Sharing Information

             Bit of a yellow coffin            

Over on Tuppenny Tim's foundering Ancient Artifacts forum, where now only a handful of members form the core of the discourse, a collector has a disturbing question:

Cleaning yellow coffins #egypt
Does anyone know how museums cleaned the so-called 'yellow coffins' from 21st dynasty. I know it is done piece by piece with a cotton swab, but I have no idea what one uses on the cotton swab to By Dikencis Van Bommel · #98543 · May 20

Yes quite a few people have very clear information on this topic. Paul Barford knows, but he's been banned from sharing that information on the list ("notorious" it says). Notorious or not, but he also knows could have said why it is very likely that another collector (doing a proud "I'm better informed than the dealer who sold it to me" show-and-tell), was "had" by that dealer, and thus other buyers on the list could be given an idea what to look for in buying anything similar. Of coure I'd also point out that if you buy an object with zero provenance and zero collection history 'grounding' it, and in addition apparently have next-to-no idea about the ancient technology of making the object you are looking at, you will end up looking a bit of a fool. And if a no-questions-asked buyer has been boasting about how they got one over on the seller that sold them a dodgy "antiquity", they look like a pompous fool. So, possibly best to keep off the forum people that can see through the collector-bluster. That way everyone in the mutual-admiration society is kept in the dark and the dealers can continue to deal the crap.