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| Harrappan (?) pot (Hansons) |
A pot bought for £4 at a car boot sale and used as a toothbrush holder has turned out to be 4,000 years old. Karl Martin said he picked up the jar, featuring an antelope, at the market in Willington, Derbyshire, five years ago. The 49-year-old said he now "feels a bit guilty" for keeping the "genuine ancient antiquity" in his bathroom. Auctioneer James Brenchley said the Indus Valley Harappan civilisation jar, which sold for £80 at auction, was made in 1900 BC.Mr Martin, from Derby, works for Hansons Auctioneers, said:
"I was helping to unload a van and noticed some pottery which was similar to my toothbrush pot. "The painting style looked the same and it had similar crudely-painted animal figures. [...] It's amazing, really. How it ended up at a south Derbyshire car boot sale, I'll never know."I think we can guess, this material started flooding European markets in recent decades, as one dealer rather too candidly admits (the webpage has gone, it seems, but is still cached):
A great deal of pottery and many terracotta figurines, (and also countless numbers of fake terracota figurines!) , have come out of Balochistan provence and North West Pakistan near the Afghanistan border since the recent conflict there. Whether this material is truly of Indus Civilization "outpost" origin or is from autonomous civilizations is still something which is undecided. Similar material came out of this arera in the early and mid 1980s during the Soviet Afghanistan period of turmoil.There is every likelihood that if it's real, Mr Martin's pot was a conflict antiquity, and if so, it's got more than toothpaste marks on it, it'll have blood on it. That was why the previous buyer had no paperwork for it. It was as dodgy as you can get. So when he got rid of it, nobody would take it and it ended up in a car boot sale being flogged off for the price of a beer or two. But Mr Brenchley got rid of it for him, despite there being any evidence that it had been exported from Pakkistan or Afghanistan legally - and with the very strong probability that it had not. He also seems from the account above to have previously shifted a van-load of similar material (was it connected with this?) There are several British dealers selling pots and figurines very similar to this on eBay. To my eye, quite a lot of them are fake, which is possible evidence that the heavily-looted region has been almost looted out.
We are going to get a lot more of this as collectors die, material will be either discarded by heirs or will be passed on without any papers (often because the collector kept none). A lot of them will be looted, a lot fake, but the whole lot is tainted. What should happen to it?
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