European Tourist Detained in Syria for Alleged Artefact Smuggling

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It was reported yesterday that a person was arrested on February 4 and is being detained in Syria on suspicion of smuggling ancient coins. The unnamed woman is married to a Syrian national and lives permanently with her husband in Cyprus.

The couple were on a visit to Syria for medical purposes and leisure [...] and the woman was arrested at the airport in possession of a large number of coins [...] no formal charges have been made yet as the Syrian authorities were still examining her case.

It would be interesting to know what line of business her husband is in. Perhaps somebody about to flee the country sold off his "old collection" to a foreign tourist (funny time to visit Syria on a holiday), or perhaps they were stolen from the rubble of a shelled building. Or maybe they are "just" the products of looting of archaeological sites in more peaceful times. Whatever the origin of these ancient coins, they will not be the only ones "surfacing" just now on the international market which originated in this unhappy country. Do coin collectors care? See below.

Stefanos Evripidou, 'Cypriot woman arrested in Syria', Cyprus Mail February 10, 2012

Proposal for Peter Tompa

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In his oral presentation before the CPAC on Wednesday, January 18, 2012 (which he subsequently published) concerning the proposed renewal of the cultural property MOU with Cyprus, Peter Tompa made a clear and unambiguous statement:

4. The CPIA requires less drastic remedies to be tried first before import restrictions are imposed, but Cyprus has no coherent regulatory scheme for metal detectors and even allows British tourists to bring them to the Island;

I happen to think that Peter Tompa is wrong here, have said so and Tompa ignores that. So I have a proposal for Peter Tompa, let's go together to Cyprus, with him with a metal detector in his luggage (I'll borrow one for him if he has not got one) and me with my video camera. Let him just first publish on his website: "I am going to Cyprus for a few days to do some metal detecting for ancient coins". He can go out metal detecting on some fields on the island and I will film him doing some "unregulated metal detecting". And when the police come to "unregulate" his metal detecting, I'll film that too. So that coineys can see that to the last, Peter Tompa was willing to back up the words he writes on their behalf with action.

Go on Mr Tompa, show us all that you really DO believe you are right.
The ACCG will pay the airfare I am sure.

Do please also dress as a British metal detectorist too, the 'squeaky nylon anorak' style I think would suit you - don't forget the gloves and kneelers. Or your probe and PAStexplorers membership card.

[By the way, builders use metal detectors to locate pipework and cables under plaster, when felling old trees its useful to check the trunks for embedded nails and wire before turning on the chainsaw. Metal detectors are used in a number of applications (and hobbies) which do not involve violating very specific antiquity laws. Mere possession of a metal detector is not a punishable offence in most countries, and in only one I know of is their movement across international borders controlled].

Vignette: US metal detectorist in socks.
 

Focus on the CCPIA: The Author, Paphos and Alex

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Coiney Edward Cohen has submitted two public comments to the CPAC. the first he begins with: "I am the author of "Dated Coins of Antiquity" published this year, 2011 [...] I could not have produced my book with the proposed restrictions on their importation to the US" In other words, is he saying that his study was based on data gathered from material which would not have had "documentation of lawful export" - in other words data of potentially illicit origin? What kind of scholarship is that? What other branches of US scholarship would tolerate publication of such a study?

Here is another one who thinks that to stem illicit exports:

The Treasure Act and Portable Antiquities Scheme must be tried first in Cyprus. It has worked immensely well in Great Britain by preserving the integrity of freshly discovered coin hoards for both study by researchers and subsequent sale to the coin market. Refer to the United Kingdom report on their website: http://www.culture.gov.uk/news/news_stories/8709.aspx [Treasure and Portable Antiquities Scheme reports unearth fascinating finds]

In passing: how many of these new English hoards have ended up being sold on the market (and how many of those coins will retain that provenance in the hands of collectors over the next few decades)? Most of them seem to be being acquired by museums at the moment. How many of these new English hoards actually HAVE been fully studied by numismatic researchers and that study fully published?

More importantly, once again [sigh] it needs to be explained to coineys like Mr Cohen (though I would hope NOT the CPAC) that the PAS and Treasure Act have absolutely NO CONNECTION with either Britain's implementation of the 1970 UNESCO Convention or the combating of unlawful export of archaeological material from England and Wales.

Of course, it would be too much to expect that the PAS would ever write to its numismatic "friends" overseas actually explaining what it does, and does not, do and sort out this convenient confusion once and for all. That would be too much like real archaeological outreach, best to leave the collectors confused, eh?

Why is this happening? Firstly the dealers and their lobbyists, like the infamous Mr Tompa are telling coineys at every opportunity all this reason-fogging stuff about the CCPIA and CPAC (in Tompa's case, on behalf of the dealers' associations he represents). That's one factor. That would not have the effects we observe if it were not for the other. It is quite probable that US-based coineys do not know very much about this PAS and Treasure Act from first hand experience, that is understandable. What however is not at all easy to comprehend is how a whole group of them can solemnly advise a body representing their own government something on the basis of unchecked hearsay. WHY are they not checking what the "PAS" does and DOES NOT DO before they send a public comment to an official advisory body like this? Is it misplaced trust in the dealers' lobbyists, gullibility, weak logic, stupidiocy, laziness or irresponsibility? Or a combination of all six? Beats me why people believe and repeat such stuff when the ability to check it out is a mere mouse-click away.

Mr Cohen's second (!) comment concerns:

The Ptolemaic tetradrachms stuck in Alexandria, Egypt and in Paphos used the identical mintmark, the Greek letters PI-A. These coins are notoriously difficult to tell apart. If this MOU is approved, then all tetradrachms of Alexandria, Egypt could be mistakenly denied entrance to the United States. This is not the intent of the Cyprus MOU.

The only reason they'd be denied entrance to the United States is if they do not have documentation of lawful export. What Mr Cohen means is that - given the fact that most coin dealers and collectors do not give a tinker's for the provenance and collecting history of the goods they shunt around the international market like potatoes - a coin of this type of Alexandria without documentation of lawful export would potentially be stopped by US Customs in the mistaken belief that it is a coin of Paphos with no documentation of lawful export.

But then, there are those of us who believe that MOU or not, the import of unlawfully exported coins from Egypt (or anywhere else in the region which has similar legislation) should not be considered as "licit". That is, after all - whether or not the coineys accept it or not - precisely what article 3 of the UNESCO Convention says. That is the measure by which they will be judged by anybody from any country (apart from, that is, the Wild West of the USA) which is a state party to that Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. In any case, hopefully that loophole will soon be closed when the US finally formalises some kind of an agreement not to allow unlawfully obtained items from Egypt free passage into the US (both countries having been state parties to the 1970 UNESCO Convention for some time).

The Next Chapter in the Story of the "Menil" Byzantine Frescoes

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The 13th century frescoes on the walls and vaulting of the church of Ayios Themomianos, a small votive chapel in Lysi, northern Cyprus were turned into "portable antiquities" (by cutting them into 38 pieces with a chainsaw before detaching them from their centuries-old place on the masonry) following the 1974 Turkish invasion. The frescoes depicting Christ Pantocrator surrounded by a frieze of angels and a panel from an apse representing the Madonna of the Sign flanked by Archangels Michael and Gabriel. They were being sold by a Turkish dealer based in Munich, Aydin Dikmen, working at the time with Michel van Rijn. They were offered to Dominique de Menil, founder of the Menil Collection, in 1983. After research revealed their true provenance, the frescoes were acquired by the Menil Collection on behalf of the Greek Orthodox Church of Cyprus. They were then restored at the cost of the Menil collection, and the Church lent the frescoes to the Menil on a long-term basis, for presentation in a consecrated chapel in Houston. The Byzantine Fresco Chapel opened to the public in 1997, with support for its construction provided by donors in Houston and across the country.

The original twenty year loan was extended for a further ten years, but now it is time for the frescoes to go back. Archbishop Chrysostomos II has turned down additional requests to keep the frescoes longer, "offering instead to dispatch an iconographer to recreate them on the chapel's dome and apses, along with a gift of 10 late-19th- and early-20th-century icons".
Cyprus Antiquities Department Director Maria Hadjicosti said officials will oversee the entire operation to transport the frescoes back to the island. Sadly the objects will not be restored to the church from which they were stolen, but a museum in Nicosia.

Menelaos Hadjicostis, 'Frescoes going home to Cyprus ', Associated press, October 1, 2011.

Museum Publicity, 'Menil Collection Returning Byzantine Frescoes to Cyprus', 1 October 2011

Vignette, The Menil Foundation.

Coiney "Guilds" Want Access to Deceased Archaeologist's EMails

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The sad saga of the legal challenge by coiney trade organizations the Ancient Coin Collectors Guild (ACCG), the International Association of Professional Numismatists (IAPN), and the Professional Numismatists Guild, Inc. PNG to US government restrictions on the import of illegally exported coins continues. Much to their shame, these groups (collectively known in the latest court document as the "Guilds") are fighting US implementation of the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property and making a dreadful and expensive mess of it. At the same time they are showing the world as clearly as could be wished by their preservationist opponents, the basis of the no-questions-asked international trade in dugup antiquities such as coins.

There has been a new development in their long-running Freedom of Information challenge which is one of the two prongs of their strategy in this attack on decency. An attack for which dealers and collectors are willing to donate thousands of dollars, raised through the sale of hundreds of decontextualised dugup ancient coins. The dealers' associations appealed a court ruling upholding the State Department's justifications for supplying the information they did on the basis of the malicious FOI request of the dealers. A verdict from the appeal court has just been released. A link to the document is published on the ACCG website. It is described there briefly thus:

The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has affirmed in part and reversed in part the judgment of the U.S. District Court in the ACCG-IAPN-PNG FOIA case. The Court affirmed most of the withholdings, but reversed the District Court’s decision on one document, and also ordered a more thorough search for certain material. The Plaintiffs are reviewing the ruling to ascertain whether any further action on the appellate level is warranted.

The court's verdict contains such appellate court legalese such as "The Guilds' evidence falls way short", "we need not worry about the implications of "limited" disclosure", but having ploughed through it, readers will discover that the implications of one document on which the court actually reversed the decision of the District Court leave a very bad taste in the mouth:

’This withholding involves various redactions from six separate emails exchanged between the late Danielle Parks, a professor of archeology who did field work in Cyprus, and Andrew Cohen, an employee of the Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs. To justify their withholding, Ms. Grafeld said, "These emails contain some information that was provided in confidence by Danielle Parks, an individual in the private sector, to a staff member of ECA's Cultural Heritage Center in connection with the then-upcoming Committee meetings regarding potential extension of the bilateral cultural property agreement" with the government of Cyprus. [...] On remand, State may provide additional reasons for its belief that Parks provided information in confidence. But its explanation in the record before us is inadequate.

The ACCG, IAPN and PNG are after private emails of a deceased person? Private emails? What are they going to do, seize her computer? How low can the coineys stoop? So it seems from this that Parks wrote to Cohen and there are internal hints in the mails that she expected this to be an exchange between her and Cohen, and the coineys received some of that information and want to see the whole of those emails? Why? What possible relevance can they have to their case, that ACCG, IAPN and PNG dealers in the US should not be prevented from importing coins illegally exported from Cyprus?

The other minor victory of the ACCG, IAPN and PNG also refers to old emails. They argue that "State failed to show the adequacy of its search, because it didn't address its employees' archived emails and backup tapes" [which "might contain emails no longer preserved on staff members' computers"]. In particular it seems although emails written to and by the Bureau's Assistant Secretary and CPAC were presented as a result of the FOI request. They complain that no mention is made of the search of all these backup tapes (which of course will not be organized for retrieval of individual documents or files, but rather for purposes of disaster recovery) for email correspondence which might be additional to that released.The recent ruling reads:

Nowhere does State explain whether it possesses email archives for Bureau employees other than the former staff member, whether there are backup tapes containing staff member emails and, if so, whether such backup tapes might contain emails no longer preserved on staff members' computers. It may well be that searching additional emails archives and backup tapes would be impossible, impractical, or futile [...] We also note that Ms. Grafeld states, after a 12-page review of what State had searched, "There are no other places that if searched would have a reasonable likelihood of containing additional responsive material." [...] given that the Guilds raised the issue of backup tapes before the district court, we think this a gap that State needed to fill in order to carry its burden as to the adequacy of its search. Specifically, under the circumstances it is reasonable to expect State to inform the court and plaintiffs whether backup tapes of any potential relevance exist; if so whether their responsive material is reasonably likely to add to that already delivered; and, if these questions are answered affirmatively, whether there is any practical obstacle to searching them.

Apart, that is, from how much that is going to cost the US taxpayer so that coin dealers can fight for their "rights" to import illegally exported coins?

You know, if I were a coin collector, I'd be blogging away and posting to the forums that this kind of activity, dredging around in dead people's email correspondence, is not something I'd want dealers to be doing in my name, ostensibly in "defence" of the kind of hobby I would want to be involved in. I would tell them this is just gross and unnecessary, and ask them to stop and just get on selling me coins that they can document have been legally imported instead of making a big show about how the dealers still want to fill the market with illegally exported items. But then I am not a coin collector, and they do not. And you would not see it anyway because they hide their discussions away from public view as though they were involved in something less-than-legal.

I just hope that, since they started this, one day soon we are going to see the seizure of some computers of ACCG, AIPN and PNG dealers and that they will have no objections to some Freedom of Information in having their hard-discs and 'backup tapes' searched for emails from suppliers and collectors which may have been 'deleted' to try and hide the network of movement of the coins they handle. And then have some investigators go and visit some of the recipients and senders of those emails. That would be far more revealing than anything Dr Parks wrote to Mr Cohen. Let us see some real 'transparency'; let's have a proper audit and let investigators find out just what these people are trading and buying that they are so concerned about these regulations which only concern illegally exported artefacts.

Vignette: the late Dr Danielle Parks R.I.P., coin dealers want to see all of her old emails to Mr Cohen.

Cypriot antiquities law on looted artefacts and private collections

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Prompted by recent discussions on this blog and elsewhere, archaeologist Sam Hardy has put up a monumentally helpful post on his blog called 'Cypriot antiquities law on looted artefacts and private collections'. It explains very carefully how at different times there were various mechanisms by which antiquities could be licitly obtained, owned and bought and sold. It also deals with illicitly-obtained antiquities. The conclusion is significant for those opposing the application of the recent Cyprus-US bilateral cultural property agreement requiring imported antiquities to be accompanied by one of two types of paperwork showing export was legal:

It is abundantly clear from this review of Cypriot legislation on excavating, finding, looting, collecting and dealing antiquities that there is a legal source for the antiquities market. More importantly, it is abundantly clear that antiquities without find-spots and acquisition dates (and, indeed, find-methods) are very probably looted.

In light of all this evidence, what may be more surprising is how blatantly illegal collections of looted antiquities have continued to be legalised by the Republic of Cyprus Department of Antiquities. Nevertheless, in order to avoid any collector's confusion over the implications of the problems in Cyprus, it is important to be clear: this disastrous policy was a product of the local community's desperate attempts to minimise the harm done by international art dealers' and antiquities collectors' direct and indirect funding of the looting of the island.

This is the kind of thing I have been proposing collectors' lobbyists should be doing systematically for all the so-called 'source countries' to help fellow collectors understand the legal context in which collecting antiquities takes place, but they prefer their own mythologising to real facts.

Cyprus Policy on Looted Artefacts

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There has been some discussion surrounding Sam Hardy's recent text 'archaeologists accepted Greek Cypriot looting of Alaas, Cyprus?' based on the evidence of the archaeological documentation of material in private hands. I mentioned it here ('Cyprus like PAS'), drawing attention to the parallels between the object-centred approach exhibited by the Cypriot authorities here and that of the PAS in the UK. Peter Tompa disagrees with this ('Cypriot Corruption Not Like PAS ') and rather oddly says the differences lie in the "corruption" which he suggests these foreign collections embody. I questioned what Tompa had said, in one post ('UK Treasure Act "Predicated on the Rule of Law" - Eh?') pointing out the discrepancy between what the Washington lawyer had said about the legal position in my own country and the real legal context; in a second ('Cyprus Collections Against the Law?') citing the Cypriot legislation on the basis of which - despite what Tompa thinks - the private possession of antiquities is not forbidden, Sam Hardy has now clarified the reasons behind the Cypriot policy (which I for one was not questioning, though I think they are wrong-headed). Barford on Cypriot antiquities looting policy logic: clarification.

Once again, we see that the xenophobic obfuscations of the collectors' lobbyists act to deflect discussion. We do seem to be getting far from the original topic which is that of archaeological ethics and the handling of looted and potentially looted material. I am glad to see that Hardy has brought the discussion back to that point.

I was taken by the concluding comments in Karen Olsen Bruhns' online essay "International Trade in Looted Antiquities, www.plunderedpast". Though concerning a totally different part of the looted past, they seem to fit perfectly the situation here:

We need to present forcefully [...] the idea that the past is not disparate things, things which are owned by individuals, that it is those things in their cultural context which permits an understanding of the past. We need to present graphically the destruction that looting causes, the racist attitudes involved in dealing and collecting, and the corruption of virtually everyone this activity leads to. [...] In the long run it is only an informed public that will make the antiquities market unprofitable and hence nonviable.

The opinions expressed by those US collectors like Mr Tompa and his sidekicks that self-declare themselves to be "cultural property internationalists" are in fact deeply embedded in a corrupt colonialist and imperialist ideology, and in fact if one examines its philosophy in any detail is the purest expression of cultural nationalism.

UPDATE 2/1/11

Sam Hardy, the author of the original post about archaeologists recording privately owned artefacts in Cyprus has asked Tompa to clarify his position (Tompa's incorrect claim on looted Cypriot antiquities collecting). He says Tompa's words indicate that he and his fellow American collectors want to have the same access to looted antiquities as Cypriot collectors.

If you object to the fact that 'the connected few are allowed to collect as much looted material as they want', do you object to anyone collecting looted material, in which case you would surely support American import restrictions, as well as [additional] Cypriot acquisition restrictions? Otherwise, does your objection have nothing whatsoever to do with Cypriot collecters' purchases underwriting looting? Instead, do you object to the fact that you were not able to buy looted Cypriot antiquities?

This cuts to the core of the matter. Despite all the talk of "fairness" and "discrimination", so-called enlightened "cosmopolitanism"/ "internationalism", when you strip away the facade what the US antiquity dealers are campaigning for is the "right" to legally import illegally exported artefacts, no matter where they come from. This is nothing more than colonialism. And these dealers and their supporters accuse others of being corrupt!

UK Treasure Act "Predicated on the Rule of Law" - Eh?

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Blogger Peter Tompa takes exception to my comparing the recording of artefacts held in private hands in Cyprus with the recording of artefacts held in private hands by Great Britain's PAS. Tompa presumes ('Cypriot Corruption Not Like PAS') to lecture me on what the PAS is and does:

No, Mr. Barford, the Treasure Act and PAS is predicated on the rule of law. Everyone is treated equally and society as a whole benefits.

Well, with respect, this is just complete nonsense. The Treasure Act is as its name implies an element of the legislation, the PAS is not. It is a voluntary Scheme not supported by any "rule of law' whatsoever. In the United Kingdom there is not this "equality" that Tompa imagines, the border between England and Scotland demarcates two regions where finders of artefacts are treated entirely differently. On one side of the line they get to keep the majority of the finds for their own collections or do with as they please, on the other side they do not. That Tompa finds my comparison "inexplicable" in fact stems from his own lack of understanding what the PAS is and is not. It also has a basis in an incomplete understanding of the relevant articles of the Cypriot Antiquities legislation as will become clear in the post below.

The recording of artefacts held in private hands in Cyprus is directly comparable with the recording of artefacts held in private hands by Great Britain's PAS. To what extent is the private ownership of artefact hunted artefacts from the archaeological sites of Britain rather than their curation in public collections an expression of equality of access to them and to what extent does society as a whole benefit? Surely locking them away in so many garden sheds and back bedrooms is not actually benefiting present generations of wider society in any way at all, let alone the ability of future generations to study an archaeological record that our generation is in the process of trashing to get the collectable bits out.
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Cyprus like PAS

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Sam Hardy has a post 'archaeologists accepted Greek Cypriot looting of Alaas, Cyprus?' . In Cyprus, it has - illogically - been regarded as OK, apparently, to buy Cypriot antiquities if they were looted from the island's archaeological record by Turks, but not OK if they were looted by Greek Cypriots. The object-focussed approach once again trumps the site-orientated one. Hardy's text concludes:

Analysing the evidence from rescue excavations of Alaas, Cyprus, it appears that private collectors violated their secret agreement with archaeologists, and bought Greek Cypriot-looted antiquities (rather than reporting the looters to the Greek Cypriot police). Worse, it seems that archaeologists accepted the looting and collecting (rather than reporting the collectors to the Greek Cypriot police).

So basically doing little more than the PAS is doing over in the UK, except rifling archaeological sites for collectables is legal over there, so its not called 'looting".

Bavarian Authorities Hoarding Stolen Antiquities?

I was looking here the other day at the effects of Bavaria's no-paperwork-needed legislation for the antiquity trade after the coineys persuaded Bavarian Minister Zeile to intervene with the US Government to attempt to persuade it not to require paperwork from Bavarian dealers. Today the breaking news is that Bavaria has just been successfully sued by the Republic of Cyprus, the Greek Orthodox Church, the Church of the Maronites and the Church of the Armenians to retrieve stolen antiquities, which had been in the custody of the Bavarian authorities since 1997. They had filed a civil law suit before Munich District Court in 2004 to retrieve the objects which had been stolen from Cyprus’ northern Turkish occupied part of the country.

The antiquities had been found in 1997 by the Bavarian police, hidden in between walls and under the floor of two flats which belong to a Turkish national, Aydin Dickmen, in Munich. Part of the findings include religious icons, part of mosaics and pieces of Byzantine frescoes of priceless historic, cultural and religious value. Since these were located, the government and the Church of Cyprus had made several moves to have these artifacts repatriated. The moves did not yield any results and it was decided to file a civil law suit before the German courts. On Thursday, 23 September, Munich District Court issued its decision on the law suit against Dickmen which vindicated fully the Church of Cyprus and the Republic of Cyprus.

See also: Elena Theofanous, 'German court orders return of stolen icons, just days before 30-year deadline expires', Cyprus Mail 27/9/10.
and Demetra Molyva,How the Cyprus Weekly Helped Church Recover Religious Work of Art, MSN February 14, 2009.

Communists and Worse-that-Nazis and the US Establishment

It is difficult not to comment on this rant from a Californian coin dealer called "The Cyprus Disconnection" about the alleged-spy-leader-that-got-away story which is worth discussing here as it is typical of the world view of at least part of the antiquity collecting community (my emphasis):

After the US State Department betrayed the interests of US citizens to curry favor with the Greek Cypriot regime, here is how that favor has been repaid: [Washington Post article...]. What a wonderfully well managed foreign policy the United States has. What a magnificent governmental organization US citizens appear to have in the State Department, which has traded away their interests to curry favor with foreign governments such as the Republic of Cyprus whose president is a Communist and whose government is evidently at the disposal of Russian spymasters, whose approach to managing international relations apparently does not in any way correspond to what US citizens think of when the word "honorable" is mentioned.

And what a magnificent organization US archaeologists seem to have in the AIA, which after all that it and other archaeological institutions did to curry favor with the Baathist regime in Iraq - arguably the most evil and unprincipled since the Third Reich - subsequently did everything in its power to ensure that the Republic of Cyprus would get whatever it wanted from the US State Department.

There is a higher law than the cynical back room deals by which the State Department, at the behest of the AIA, double-crossed and betrayed the interests of US citizens interested in the licit collecting of minor antiquities such as ancient coins. There is a higher law than"archaeologie ueber alles" which seems to be the doctrinaire approach of the AIA in determining its attitude toward private collecting. It is time that this higher law is considered.

Perhaps it is also time for the US State Department to give some thought to how it is being perceived by the citizens of this great Republic, and for the AIA to consider whether it is really in the best interests of that organization to be associated with foreign governments such as the Baathist regime in Iraq and the Republic of Cyprus.

Phew. Creepy stuff, eh? That's a prime demonstration what prolongued contact with multiple examples of corroded coins from the soil does to the brain. "Currying favour with the worse-than-Nazis", eh? Allied with "Communists"? If Mr Welsh thinks that Iraq had "arguably the most evil and unprincipled [government] since the Third Reich" then what does he think of a government that actively co-operated with it in the years when Hussein was consolidating his power? That supplied it with weapons? Did Mr Welsh speak out US foreign policy in the early 1980s, or only when the war-hungry imperialist hyenas started wailing? There are many corrupt and unjust governments in the world, but ACCG dealers are perfectly willing to sell coins apparently from the territories of some of them I see.

Frankly, I think if the AIA or any of its members had any guts, they would get in touch with a decent lawyer and haul Welsh over the coals over his accusation that the Institute actively "curried favour" with the worse-than-Nazis. What form did this take? Have we video of Brian Rose shaking hands with the now-deposed ruler? Well, we have pictures of a prominent collector sitting smilingly next to the President of this Institute, obviously unperturbed by what Welsh alleges, presumably Shelby White's membership of the ACCG has been revoked.

As we read in the papers, the real reason why the Cypriots did not lock Mr Metzos up seems to be that the US bungled the arrests. The Department of Justice was slow in sending the requisite papers to Cyprus, even though they had been preparing for this for years. So it is nothing to do with the State Department, nothing to do with ancient coins, cultural property or any of the other issues the silly US coineys attempt to link this with.

Who is "betraying" "the interests of US citizens", those who persist in loudly shouting that US citizens all want to buy illegally exported coins, or those that quietly try to regulate the market to attempt to cut down the number of illegally exported coins that US dealers can import? Do US citizens as a whole want to buy stolen property or not? Do 310 million people want the ACCG to speak for their "interests", or would they, if they knew what the ACCG was up to, consider that this group of ranting no-questions-asked indicriminate peddlars of artefacts taken from the archaelogical heritage of other countries speaks for them?

It seems that not even all the collectors think that way. Here is the comment from Ancient Antiquities list of one Al Schlaf from Des Moines, IA:

As I read the original posting, I noted it got more whackadoodle as it went on. I frequent several current events/political fora and have seen the truly nut job rants of the Tea Party types, but this most definitely goes way beyond that, well nigh into the Roman Piso theory quackery. As my son would say, "Dude, just step away from the bong".

That just about sums up the intellectual level of the coiney rants. The coins clearly have the same deleterious effects on the thinking process as prolongued use of narcotics (parents of ACE-outreached kids please note).

Roman Piso ("The True Authorship of the New Testament"), for those who've never come across it is a classic literary genre in its own right, bet it was written by a collector of Roman coins.
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Knee-jerk in slow motion: The ACCG and Christopher Metsos

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I wondered how long this would take coming, the coineys are so predictable, but this one took a few days to get through the fog in the synapses caused by too much contact with dug-ups, from the former president of the ACCG Washington lawyer Peter Tompa: 'So Much for Cooperation: Greek Cypriots Let Suspected Russian Spy Escape'.

1) Of course reading the somewhat unbalanced treatment given in the Washington Post article cited there, it apparently never occurs to somebody whether the illegal export of antiquities from the island might not all be in the hands of local organized criminal gangs... Who are these "Russians" who have the Mediterranean villas and offshore banking accounts on the island? Does not the extremely lucrative no-questions-asked international antiquities market hold any temptations for any of them?

One wonders why a US group would be wanting to fight the regulation of the illegal market, with whom would that be collaborating? What business links do ACCG members have in Cyprus? In Communist China, in Bulgaria and Italy? Indeed, what are the business and political links of the many eastern Europeans currently involved both as dealers and middlemen (suppliers) in the US and UK and other countries in Europe selling dugups and fakes indiscriminately? Into whose pockets is the money from the n0-questions-asked antiquities trade going (and if no questions are asked, how can anyone tell)?

2) odd, isn't it ? The US "collectors' rights" lobby loudly protests its "innocence" (of complicity in crimes against cultural property) because it is not actually illegal to buy in the US coins that have been illegally exported from another country since no US laws have been broken". This is their constitutional right they say. This is not even against their so-called "code of ethics". But one of their member thinks an accused man should be locked up in a foreign country on some vague allegations that he might somehow have been involved with people who it is alleged may have broken the law in the US. Surely by the ACCG line of reasoning, there should first be a demonstration that a Cypriot law was broken by this man. I think it has long been clear that there is a signal lack of logic and coherence in the arguments of the no-questions-asked collecting lobby, this is a case in point.

3) How astounding, the US government attempts to STOP American dealers buying illegally exported coins (coins that no ethical or moral businessmen would want to sell anyway) and then its citizens like Mr Tompa apparently expect the foreign country they come from to fall at its feet in gratitude and do anything the US demand of it. ["Jail this man!!" "yes, Uncle Sam, Sir! Can I lick your boots too?"]. Cyprus is a sovereign state, not a US satellite, and has its own laws which are not written in Washington. Its judicial procedure and exercise of human rights cannot be bought with the promise to stop US businesses trading in illegally exported dugup ancient coins which the rest of the civilised world thinks they should not be selling anyway. Especially when a whole group of them say they are not going to stop anyway and are even publicising the fact that they have already illegally imported a batch of them to "challenge" the US government because they want the law overturned. That is hardly likely to make Cyprus think that the "gift" offered by the US was offered with any sincerity or hope of success.

Really, the narrow-minded arrogance of these people !!

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Coiney Ahistoricity

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Coin collectors say they fondle their coins because they are "passionately interested in history". But they see their happy-go-lucky no-questions-asked way of doing their "history" homework threatened by preservationists. They have though their imagined saviour, Wayne Sayles and his dealer mates of the ACCG. John Pennock (who grandly puts after his name the letters: "ACCG ANA PAN") a collector of ancient coins says there is no middle ground:

Being an ancient coin collector and not supporting the ACCG now, is akin to being Neville Chamberlin trying to appease Hitler by dividing Poland.

I will not quote the rest of Pennock's embarrassing naivity here [just to add that he might like to find out more about antiquity collecting in Cyprus for example]. Mr "Chamberlin" (sic) did not "divide Poland". Perhaps instead of fondling coins to get them speak about the ancient world, some collectors would do better to try and get a better grasp on the modern world...

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Numismatic journalist gets it WRONG again !

Wannabe numismatic journalist Richard Giedrojć tries to do good, but puts his foot in it again. He says that

"the “Around the World” column of World Coin News, has been reporting some of the efforts to discourage the United States from entering into agreements with such countries as China, Cyprus, Greece, Italy, and Turkey regarding the repatriation of antiquities including coins that are determined to be the cultural patrimony of any of those nations".

Ummm, we thought the US had already entered into agreements with three of those countries and was committed to honouring its international committments with regard to the others. Not so much for "repatriation" Mr G., but checking that antiquities imported into the US had been exported in due accord with the law. Once again we have the confusion between "repatriation" and measures intended to curb illicit exploitation of the archaeological record and cuultural resource which is so beloved of the rhetoricists of free-for-all-no-questions-asked-indiscriminate-collecting of dugup artefacts.

Anyway Mr Giedrojć writes about "The 1970 UNESCO agreement, to which the United States is not yet a signatory, that would obligate the U.S. to seize and returning (sic) such objects from museums and private collections has also been the subject of this column". Hmmm? There really is no other word for this, "stupidity" is the only word that comes to mind.
One: the United States has signed the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Cultural Property (see here). You would think any collector and dealer would actually know that.
Two: If you read the title further than the word "convention" it can easily be seem that it does NOT "obligate" (sic) its signatories to "repatriate" just any old "antiquities including coins that are determined to be the cultural patrimony of any of those nations". What it concerns is the treatment of items that have been illicitly removed from other countries. We are told that the antiquities market contains "many" artefacts which are there entirely legitimately. The convention does not cover them at all. To suggest otherwise is simply ignorance, and in the case of a journalist irresponsible.

Giedrojc then gets cutesy:

What we as coin collectors don’t see is the proverbial “other side of the coin” – why these countries are so adamant about protecting their cultural patrimony. Is it greed on the part of these governments, or in some situations is it that they want to safeguard their culture from irresponsible plunder? Cyprus has been in the news recently for this reason.

There then follows a recounting of the story of the February arrest of antiquity dealers on Cyprus reported here. He adds that:

It is smuggling activities such as these in which coins and other objects have been looted from archaeological sites that fuel the arguments for the United States and other nations to sign the UNESCO 1970 and other agreements regarding repatriation of cultural patrimony.

Well, the US already has signed this convention. For this very reason, looting and plundering is going on, and the no-questions-asked market is still buying artefacts totally without any discrimination of what comes from where and how. Of course he could not fail to add the obligatory ACCG byline:

On the other hand, it can be argued that if the antiquities laws weren’t so strict, the antiquities trade wouldn’t be driven underground, encouraging such illegal activities

No, we could make all sorts of things legal and then save ourselves the problem of investigating and punishing people for doing them, I am sure we can find interest groups requiring similar treatment. I wonder whether in fact it can be "argued" that lifting laws intended to protect the archaeological record from exploitation as a source of collectables and allowing people to do it entirely in the open would have the effect of stopping it. That seems to be an entirely illogical argument in my opinion. In England and Wales, the exploitation of archaeological sites in this legally-approved manner has certainly not been reduced, let alone stopped the digging up of collectables and their constant flow out of the ground and onto eBay is (or jolly well should be) a source of concern.

While it is heartening to see that the problem of the relationship of collecting with looting is being discussed in the numismatic press, it would be nice to see the people writing such stories not encumbering such stories with the usual old ACCG-based mishmash of mistruths and misleading mantras.

Two other interesting features about the article, Giedrojć believes in the "gold coffin" (ha ha) and the link in his article leads to something unintended, but perhaps indicating who is behind Mr G's apparently written-to-order articles. It turns out he is a coin dealer from Ohio, I'd not noticed that before, not that I am all that interested.
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Tourist Trinkets in Cyprus Relic Bust?

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Antiquity collectors were in stitches over a BBC report "Cyprus smuggling ring broken up" at the end of January. Let us remind ourselves the gist of the story:

Police in Cyprus have broken up a smuggling ring that was trying to sell stolen antiquities worth more than 11m euros (£9.6m), officials say. Artefacts for sale include urns, silver coins and figurines, some of which are thought to be 4,000 years old. Police are investigating whether an international network was involved. Ten people have been detained and five others are being sought in what analysts say could be the largest such ring ever discovered in the country. While many of the objects found came from Cyprus, others were thought to have been made elsewhere, antiquities officials said.

The article was accompanied by two photos, one a big box full of intact pottery vessels probably ripped from graves.

The other photo was what caused the hilarity. The bright shiny mummy case with the removable pointy-head alien figure is clearly a tourist trinket. It has a little "AP" on it which suggests the BBC got it from Associated Press, who would have got it... where? Is this a photo supplied by the Cypriot authorities? Was it a stock photo of an "antiquity" popped in as a space-filler? Or do the ACCG have a sympathiser in the Associated Press who put it in to discredit the Cypriot government at their bidding ? (Oops, I feel a little conspiracy theory of my own coming on....).

On the other hand, what actually is so improbable in the people who are accused of supplying looted Cypriot antiquities to the international market also being involved in the trade in fake artefacts? Bulgarian dugup relic suppliers and dealers freely mix the two. The suppliers of the antiquities market do not have to be experts - just law-breakers out to make a quick buck to plough into other dubious "business ventures" and eager to get their hands on any old saleable collectable item. The items allegedly prepared for export by these suppliers need not all have been intended to be offered to the same dealer.

I suppose that raises the question for collectors, do they know who the man their dealer bought his items from bought them from and what else he trades in?

Anyway to come back to the Cyprus bust, I suppose to find out what artefacts were involved we must wait for those responsible to be hauled over the coals, together with all (I repeat all) of those that have been attempting to import illegally exported items of Cypriot origin into foreign countries.

Photos: BBC/AP

What Part of the Phrase "Export Licence" Don't You Understand?

The US-based "Cultural Property Observer" has whinged about some "Cypriot Icons: Presumed "Stolen" on Entry to America but "For Sale" Legally in Cyprus?. His complaint is that under current import regulations on material from that country, some icons from Cyprus are deemed "stolen" by the US government but some icons are being sold quite openly in Cyprus itself. He cites an upcoming auction organized by art dealers "La Parole Divine" (an art consultancy which advises collectors and promotes the work of selected artists across Europe, Russia and the US with especial expertise in the field of Byzantine, Greek and Russian icons).

I am not quite sure what cultural property lawyer Tompa thinks he is doing issuing such warnings to scare off US customers like this. Still less why he thinks any of the icons on sale in this auction might be regarded as "stolen". The press release indicates that some come from existing Russian and US collections,and I would be very surprised if any of those on offer were ripped from the iconostases of Cypriot churches.

But, and here is the point, if they were, it would be very remiss of the Cypriot authorities to give them the all important piece of paper which Tompa and his dugup-antiquity-gobbling mates in the ACCG are kicking against, an export licence. If Tompa had struggled to the end of the press release he would have seen that Cyprus is regarded by the organizers of the auction as a very welcoming place for such an event not least because "the island’s Governmental Regulations permit the importation and sale of cultural goods provided they are of clear provenance". He'd have known that anyway if he was one of the leading cultural property lawyers in the US. Anyway, it does. Anyone buying an icon at this sale and wishing to export it legally should apply for a licence. I expect if they are asked very nicely, "La Parole Divine" will help the successful bidders out. So potential US customers need not be scared off by Tompa's alarmist nonsense.

I have noted here before that the coin-fondling antiquitists seem to have mainly fluff and coin dust between their ears which has given cause to wonder if antiquity collecting is having an adverse effect on their mental health and cognitive abilities. We hear talk amoing them of fighting some non-existent "ban on imports" when no such ban exists, here we see an attempt to suggest that the US gub'nmint sees ALL icons from Cyprus as "stolen" the moment they approach US shores. Both of these statements are completely untrue and just require a little bit of reading of the CPIA to check out. What is required by the CPIA is for imported items of certain categories into the US to be accompanied by a valid export licence from the country of export (or failing that a mere piece of paper signed by the dealer that what he is selling is legally sold and exported). Check it out (pay attention to "Section 2606. Import Restrictions a) Documentation of lawful exportation", but also (b) Customs action in absence of documentation, and especially the 'wall of bubbles" cop-out clause: (c) "Definition of satisfactory evidence", (1) and (2)). The categories affected by such restrictions include
ritual and ecclesiastical ethnological material from Cyprus representing the
Byzantine period (which include icons). The 1999 Import Restrictions Imposed On Byzantine Ecclesiastical and Ritual Ethnological Material from Cyprus says:

"The materials on this list are subject to Sec. 12.104a(b), Customs Regulations (19 CFR 12.104a(b)). As provided in 19 U.S.C. 2601 et seq., and Sec. 12.104a(b), Customs Regulations, listed materials from this area may not be imported into the U.S. unless accompanied by documentation certifying that the material left Cyprus legally and not in violation of the laws of Cyprus. In the event an importer cannot produce the certificate, documentation, or other evidence required by Sec. 12.104c, Customs Regulations (19 CFR 12.104c)at the time of making entry, Sec. 12.104d, Customs Regulations (19 CFR 12.104d) provides that the port director shall take custody of the material until the certificate, documentation, or evidence is presented.

Seems quite simple and reasonable (see CPIA "Section 2606. Import Restrictions "(c) Definition of satisfactory evidence").
The 2007 "Extension of Import Restrictions Imposed on Pre-Classical and Classical Archaeological Objects and Byzantine Period Ecclesiastical and Ritual Ethnological Material From Cyprus" extends this, but still includes the original categories: "Importation of such materials continues to be restricted unless the conditions set forth in 19 U.S.C. 2606 and 19 CFR 12.104c are met".

So, the bottom line is, despite the collector-rousing alarmism of the ACCG anti-preservation activists, if the paperwork is in order the US buyer returning from this sale need have no fear that US customs will be impounding their purchases as "stolen". Quite a different matter are those who import items affected by such restrictions deliberately flaunting the requirement to have the documentation of legitimate provenance in order.

Photo: Unless I am mistaken, the icon used on the auctioneers website is 15th century Northern Russian, not Cypriot.

Patrick Dewhurst: "US collectors to regain right to trade ancient Cyprus coins"

In an article in the Cyprus Mail, Feb. 25, 2010, Patrick Dewhurst optimistically trumpets: "US collectors to regain right to trade ancient Cyprus coins". Mr Dewhurst, they never "lost" them. What they want is to be able to continue to trade them no-questions-asked like in the good old days back in the nineteenth century.

Not exactly a brilliant piece of investigative journalism, but it has got the coin dealers excited because it is published in Cyprus. Whoopee.

So who is Patrick Dewhurst and what does he stand for?
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Does Mr Ehrenberg believe... ?

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Looting Matters has a thought-provoking text about the further developments in the Baltimore illegal coin import stunt resulting from the efforts of the Professional Numismatic Group and the International Association of Professional Numismatists to challenge new US regulations on antiquity imports from China and Cyprus. The US dugup coin dealers' lobby group the Ancient Coin Collectors Guild is also involved in this action. Now an action has been filed on behalf of the ACCG (as plaintiff) against the US Customs and Border Protection, Department of Homeland Security; the Commissioner, US Customs and Border Protection; the US Department of State; and specifically the Assistant Secretary of State (educational and cultural Affairs), United States Department of State. (The pdf can be found here). The case is being handled by Jason H. Ehrenberg , a Washington employment law specialist from Bailey & Ehrenberg PLLC and asks

Does Mr Ehrenberg [...] care if archaeological sites on Cyprus are being looted to provide archaeological material for the market? Or is the issue about the right to collect and to own antiquities?

Or indeed sell them no-questions-asked? Is this not about protecting the livelihood of no-questions-asked dealers who would find their sources of coins severely restricted if they had to provide a proper paper trail for the artefacts they handle like those in other branches of the retail trade such as butchers and grocers? Is this why the ACCG has used its members' funds to engage a specialist in employment law? Laughable.

Even more comical, as noted by David Gill, is the use of the Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia as a cited authority in the legal papers (section 61), seen in the context of the recent comments about academic journals by a book-shy partner at Bailey & Ehrenberg discussed recently in this blog. Not very professional, laughable in fact.

The whole text of the application filed to Maryland District court has a familiar ring to it, we find in it the same conspiracy theories aired by junior partner Peter Tompa in his tinfoil helmet blog. Mr Ehrenberg solemnly put his signature under a text containing such nonsense signifying that he believes the facts, pseudo-facts, insinuations and speculations therein to be something the court should take seriously. Laughable. The reader can judge for themselves, but Section 24 contains some dubious definitions, let us hope the court (if this case is not thrown out after the judge has finished laughing) asks some social anthropologists about what it is that Ehrenburg is defining there. I guess that's what you get for not reading books. Section 89 is remarkably coy about stating who actually bought the coins, and who they were actually bought from. This is interesting because the court is apparently required to believe (in adjudicating in the favour of the importer) that the coins were indeed acquired by them from a legal source, but without having the ability to contact them to check whether that is the case. The names of both seller and buyer should be visible in this document. Since, however it is said (section 89) that it was the 'ACCG' who bought the coins, and the address of the ACCG is given at the head of the document, it is a reasonable assumption that the coins were intercepted being sent to the  Gainsville  MO address given there, which is interesting to note. 

The whole bundle of alleged improprieties that are catalogued in this suit, if they were all looked into by the court would make this into a marathon trial, costing a great deal of money. It seems to me however that this has been compiled as a "nuisance claim", just for the sake of attracting attention and putting a spanner in the works. After all, the ACCG has raiseed 80 000$ or more from its members to fight this action, so they obviously are obliged to produce something to show for it. It seems the best their lawyers can do is cobble together the stuff from Tompa's website, and add a bit of legal waffle (but unbelievably actually missing out a mention of the most important piece of US legislation which is fundamental to clinching the case - that's what you get when you get an employment law specialist to produce a suit about cultural property) .

In a comment to the Looting matters text Wayne Sayles writes: "The fact is that in America, there are rules (call them laws if you like). ACCG is playing by those rules. There are some who would like the rules to be different". Well, quite simply put, those who imported those coins into Baltimore (and we are told it was the ACCG behind this, of which Sayles of Sayles and Lavendar is Executive Director) were not "playing by those rules". On the contrary, they were deliberately breaking the existing law in an attempt to provoke a court case and I think the people supporting this action hope that there it will affect more than Cypriot and Chienese coins. The individuals and organizations behind this shameful action are clearly hoping to overturn any restrictions on the international movement of antiquities. For this reason, I will continue to follow this case with the greatest of attention, and will continue in my blog to express my opinion on the shameful agendas of all those involved in the no-questions-asked trade which are behind it. That's the PNG, the IAPN and the ACCG and all their affiliated clubs and dealers for starters. Shame on the lot of them. What clowns they are making of themselves with this futile action to maintain the nineteenth century approach to antiquity trading into the new millennium.

UPDATE 16/2/10:
Kimberly Alderman has an entertaining post on this text ("Cultural Property Law Deathmatch: The Ancient Coin Collectors Guild v. The State Department"), it seems she enjoyed it as much as me (" it's the equivalent of cultural property lawyer porn"). She criticises its form and structure and content ("The complaint contains a hefty portion of vague allegations of impropriety, but none of them really stick") and believes that the suit will fail to change cultural property law in the US. So a nuisance claim in effect.

Dugup Coin Dealers: It's a Conspiracy, no alternative to litigation

“Of course, having been rebuffed by the Department of State I[nspector] G[eneral] (and perhaps having been retaliated against for even bringing up concerns about process), the ACCG, IAPN and PNG had no recourse but to litigation” writes ACCG’s apologist Peter Tompa.

So why would the US government retaliate against the "Ancient Coin Collectors Guild", and "International Association of Professional Numismatists", and the "Professional Numismatists Guild"? Well, apparently “Some time ago, the ACCG, IAPN and PNG asked the State Department I[nspector] G[eneral] to review the practices of the [State Department Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs] Cultural Heritage Center” […] (Tinfoil helmets on for this one please) “which shortly thereafter departed from existing precedent and the Cultural Property Advisory Committee's recommendations before imposing import restrictions on coins of Cypriot type”. Well, I suppose one can see this as "retaliation" if of a certain mental disposition, most of the rest of us would see this as recogition that ancient coins are archaeological artefacts.

"No alternative", eh? How about the ACCG, IAPN and PNG simply following what US law lays down about the import of certain groups of ancient coins? It's not particularly onerous, just means getting a piece of paper to accompany certain groups of imported coins. That is after all what the codes of ethics of all three groups require them to do.

Photo: this could be a US coin collector telling the world how victimised he is.

ACCG attacks Ethical Collecting Blogger

Yesterday I made a post about a comment posted on Robyn’s “Pieces of the Past” blog (if you’ve not visited the blog, please do) and today I wake up to find two comments by the Executive Director and the former president of the ACCG have been added to it. While the former restricted himself to his customary abusive manner of response, the latter made a number of comments which are worthy of highlighting.

Here Tompa confronts the blog owner in the same aggressive manner that he reserves for all that dare to ask questions of the ACCG. He writes:

I am curious why your blog is anonymous. Please identify yourself and any relationships you may have with members of the archaeological community. There is some speculation that you are merely Mr. Barford or some other member of the
archaeological community posing as an "ethical collector," presumably as a point of contrast to the supposedly "unethical collectors" that support the ACCG. Hopefully, not.

Yeah right. Help the coineys stop their conspiracy-theory speculation by identifying yourself to Mr Tompa, declare the source of the income supporting your blogging and collecting and what affiliations you have to foreign governments. Are you now or have you ever shaken hands with Nicholas Burns? We’ve heard it all before.

Let me just go on record here as saying that for better or worse I write here under my own name and I am not “Robyn”.

How odd that Mr Tompa should think that there would be NO ethical collectors willing to write anything about the ethics of collecting, surely the whole point behind ACCG lobbying is that they want to convince the public and lawmakers that most US collectors are indeed ethical, and intimations to the contrary are hateful propaganda by people like me. Please get your side's story straight Mr Tompa.

Tompa accuses his correspondent of ignorance. He says “I suggest you review the requirements of the CPIA rather than relying on Barford et al. for legal analysis”. Absolutely. But then in my posts on this blog (for instance, among others, here, here, here, here, and here) I have more than enough times given reference to the CPIA and the exact paragraphs to which I am referring, enough to enable the reasonably intelligent reader to check whether what I have been saying has any basis in fact. We will note that nowhere, neither here (in comments to this blog), nor on their blogs or on the ACCG website do Tompa or Sayles or any others ACCG Merry Men give any indication to their readers where and how what “Barford et al.” have written about the actual contents of the CPIA is a misinterpretation. I suggest we take that silence as significant.

Mr Tompa admits that it is true however what I say when I assert that to legally import items on the designated list, “they must be accompanied either by an export certificate or proof the item was out of the country as of the date of the restrictions”. That is exactly what I have been saying since the coin stunt (well, actually as I pointed out earlier here, if you look at the dealer friendly CPIA, it is not even “proof” that is required, but merely a vague assurance). The ACCG had ninety days to provide the latter, and as I pointed out yesterday failed to do so. In which case if this documentation cannot be provided, the ACCG bought items which cannot legally and thus (by their own code of ethics at least) ethically be brought into the USA.

Mr Tompa tries to throw Robyn off the scent by declaring:

Without getting bogged down too much in detail, as to the ACCG coin importation, all the coins were properly declared to US Customs

Well, actually it is the detail we non-coineys are most interested in Mr Tompa. The use of the term “properly” is somewhat disingenuous here. Properly declaring imported goods which are among those restricted by US law would be with the presentation of the documents required by law. Documents which in this case the importer deliberately left out, because as “[i]t was made clear to Customs that ACCG wishes to test their regulations in Court”. This is not declaring restricted goods properly but provocatively improperly.

Tompa is proudly candid about the origins of these coins, he admits that the “ACCG has no idea where or when they may have been found”. But they were selected as a test case as representative of what ACCG dealers would still sell them to their customers. That surely is the point that I have been making all along about the no-questions-asked market and its relationship to the flow of looted artifacts onto the market. Which brings us onto the next point.