“Provenance Diagrams” for Ancient Coins: Chain-of-Custody, Publication, Sales and Other Important Events in Numismatic “Object Biography”

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See also: Provenance Glossary (Plate Coins & Old Collections)

This post presents three examples of “Provenance Diagrams” (as I’ve been calling them) for coins in my collection. (Click on images to enlarge; the gold text below links to coins’ description pages.)

“Provenance Diagrams” are a way to visually represent important moments in a coin’s “object biography.” These can begin with a hoard discovery, continue to sales and collections, or publications, exhibitions, and other key events. The diagrams below place the Year on the X-axis, and geography on the Y-axis (with East at the top, West at the bottom).

My examples below are all from a private collection, but there’s no reason why the same couldn’t be done with coins in institutional collections (some of my others are coins exhibited at or deaccessioned from museums).

Provenance research and “object biography” can address central questions in the history of numismatic knowledge: How has our understanding of a given type developed over time? Which coins are published, which escape notice? When, where, how, and how often have coins traveled across international borders, or into and out of museum collections? Which collectors, publications, commercial actors, and institutions are connected by social networks?

Click the image to enlarge; or see the left side and right side separately. The album here also includes the eight photos individually w/ additional bibliographic detail.

Just one theme illustrated by the Hidrieus Tetradrachm above: Changing sources of literature on ancient coins. The early twentieth century, before World War II, is known as a “golden age” of auction catalogs (e.g., the Naville-Bement sale [1921]) and standalone publications of major private collections (e.g., Spink-Weber [1922] and Comparette-Bement [1922]). These often served as important supplements to the British Museum Catalogs, which could not illustrate or describe every type in detail. In the post-war period, sale catalogs were largely displaced by major series such as Sylloge Nummorum Graecorum (1930s-1980s, including SNG Lockett, SNG von Aulock, and many others). In the 21st century, digital photography and publishing have allowed online auctions and archives to serve a major role in ancient coin research.

Most of the information shown above was provided by auction descriptions before I bought the coin. The following examples had lost most of their provenance history before I bought them, so I discovered the bulk of the information by researching the coins myself.

This coin is notable for having been directly involved in several key transitions in the changing commercial market for ancient coins in the late twentieth century. First, it was included in the “Athena Fund,” perhaps the first major ancient coin investment fund (by Merrill-Lynch with Bruce McNall of Numismatic Fine Arts), which spectacularly failed, its holdings auctioned by Sotheby’s in 1993. (McNall went to prison for a time and then wrote a fantastic autobiography!)

Nine years after Athena Fund’s collapse, it was one of the first ever ancient coins encapsulated by a Third-Party Grading company. (Though I had to remove the coin in order to discover its prior provenance.) It was “slabbed” for the Heritage Signature Sale 296 of the Dr. Joseph Seventko Collection, which served as a major opportunity to promote and advertise the practice of slabbing. ICG (Independent Coin Graders, Tampa, FL) and Heritage Auctions ran repeated full-page ads in The Celator. Although the first sale of slabbed ancients seems to have resulted in dismally low prices, the practice stuck, and Heritage (largest seller of ancient coins in N. America) now sells almost exclusively encapsulated ancient coins.

It is also worth noting that coin’s history prior to the 1980s/1990s and its findspot were undocumented — that hasn’t changed as much as one would like, but was a matter of even less regard then. (This coin may come from the late 1970s “Tarsus Hoard,” so named for the type of stater of which it was apparently composed. See: Bing, Daniel J. 1998. “Datames and Mazaeus: The Iconography of Revolt and Restoration in Cilicia.” Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte 47 (1): 41-76; esp. p. 63, note 6, and p. 73.)

The final coin is notable for having been published in BCD Thessaly II — one of the major sales of the “BCD Collection” of Greek coins, at CNG’s Triton XV (New York, 3 Jan 2012) — and several publications to which the collector contributed photos and data. (See also my page on the BCD Collection and related literature.)

Interestingly, I found that not only had the coin already lost its BCD Thessaly provenance by the time I bought it, but that additional provenance had been neglected in the Triton XV catalog.

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Update (2024):

Object bio diagram added for Nero & Agrippina Jr. Drachm on provenance pages Roman (Part V) & RPC (Part III).

That one was crowded w/ details but without an overarching “point” or theme. Therein lies (or lacks) the value of the diagrams; they’re most useful for objects that illustrate specific important historical events (e.g., the rise & fall of Athena Fund) or processes (e.g., post-War coin photography as data). Maybe I can revise the Agrippina Jr. to highlight something significant beyond the coin’s own history (which, of course, is important in its own right).