Friday, 17 January 2025

Where Did You Say you Got Those Artefacts From?

       dugup coin, how did it get onto the market and reach you?       

Teheran Times, 'Iran takes legal action to seize historic coins sold at foreign auction' January 17, 2025

 The Classical Numismatic Group (CNG), established in 1975, is a prominent auction house specializing in ancient, medieval, and British coins  with offices in Lancaster (Pennsylvania, USA), London (UK), and The Hague (Netherlands). The Managing Director i is Mike Gasvoda. The coins they sell tend not to have any explicitly-stated collection history taracing their origins back to some past legal acquisition, neither do sales offers tend to have information about the existence of export documentation. Iran’s Minister of Culture alleges that in a recent sale the CNG is illegally selling coins “definitively linked” to Iran’s archaeological sites and moved to take action against the sale.
Leila Khosravi, the head of Iran’s Directorate of Museums, stated that as soon as the Ministry was informed of CNG’s intention to auction the coins, it took immediate steps to request the seizure of two specific coins, which have been definitively linked to Iran’s ancient sites, CHTN reported on Thursday. The Ministry sent official communications to the relevant authorities to request the stoppage of the sale. [...] The coins in question are from the pre-Achaemenid and Sassanian periods, and their sale was first reported by Iranian media. In response, the Ministry’s cultural heritage division acted swiftly to assert Iran’s claim of ownership and demand the return of the artifacts. Despite these efforts, reports from local counsel reveal that CNG Auction House sold one of the coins the previous day, with another still pending sale.
Let us hope the buyers can now prove they did their due diligence to avoid buying stolen property, and if they can't show that, what happens next? The coins were not dug up in Surbitoin in the UK with a PAS record of the findspot - so how can the buyer explain that he has these valuable pieces of Iranian history? Eh?

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