Collector Surprised: One Born every Minute

A collector was tempted by the offer recently made by ZZCoins to sell some bulk lots of 'unsorted coins from Israel'. Yeah, right, one born every minute. This, from a coiney forum, is what he found: (Re: ZZ Antiquities, ZZ Imports, ZZ Metals, ZZ Expensive... Sat Jan 14, 2017 3:50 pm (PST) . Posted by: swfeingoldsays):

I recently bought 1 kilo of uncleared coins from the dealer. There were very disappointing. About [one third] were small 8 mm coins with nothing to identify them whatsoever. Even though they were from Israel and advertised as including Judaeans, city coins and Seleucid most were late Roman or Byzantine and of the I only found 10 Nabatean 20 Judaeans no city coins and only 3 of any real interest

So, five hundred dollars down the drain. And how much archaeological destruction does the accumulation of that kilogramme of artefact dug-up-and-sold-like-potatoes represent? Because we do not believe the spiel that what is being sold in bulk lots is 'unsorted'. These are the bits of a much larger assemblage which are 'more difficult to sort' and are left behind when somebody else further up the supply chain cherry-picked what was saleable individually before amalgamating individual lots in a bulk mass to be sold by weight. The text 'the saga of the uncleaned coin' was disappeared by the dealers from the Internet about five years ago, but you can still read it on this blog, it is quite revealing. I used to do a lot about uncleraned coins, but thought I'd covered it, but it seems that some people are slow learners. Coineys, eh?