7,500 Ancient Coins Seized - Three Arrested

On August 20, 2009 the Superintendent of Police at Varanisi in India announced to the press that three men were "nabbed" by local authorities for trying to sell over 7,500 "ancient silver coins weighing 68.3 Kg." During interrogation, the men told police that they had found the coins while digging at their ancestral house in Deoria District.

Visions come to mind of the ubiquitous Kushan, Mughal or even Baktrian issues which of course would immediately be labeled by some local archaeologist as "priceless treasures" destined for the illicit U.S. coin market. But wait -- there is more! The coins were determined upon investigation to date back to 1861 and 1892 and they bore images of the British monarchs Queen Victoria and King George. Ancient indeed! (note the "back to" phraseology -- none of the coins of George V are more than 100 years old yet). Yes, according to the terms of the UNESCO Resolution, these coins are Cultural Property and apparently under the laws of India they belong to the State.

Is there something wrong with this picture? Here's what the UNESCO convention covers:

(a) Rare collections and specimens of fauna, flora, minerals and anatomy, and objects of palaeontological interest;

(b) property relating to history, including the history of science and technology and military and social history, to the life of national leaders, thinkers, scientists and artist and to events of national importance;

(c) products of archaeological excavations (including regular and clandestine)
or of archaeological discoveries ;

(d) elements of artistic or historical monuments or archaeological sites which have been dismembered;

(e) antiquities more than one hundred years old, such as inscriptions, coins and engraved seals;

(f) objects of ethnological interest;

(g) property of artistic interest, such as:

(i) pictures, paintings and drawings produced entirely by hand on any support and in any material (excluding industrial designs and manu-factured articles decorated by hand);

(ii) original works of statuary art and sculpture in any material;

(iii) original engravings, prints and lithographs ;

(iv) original artistic assemblages and montages in any material;

(h) rare manuscripts and incunabula, old books, documents and publications of special interest (historical, artistic, scientific, literary, etc.) singly or in collections ;

(i) postage, revenue and similar stamps, singly or in collections;

(j) archives, including sound, photographic and cinematographic archives;

(k) articles of furniture more than one hundred years old and old musical instruments.

Yes, I have published this list before and I apologize for the tedious repetition, but it is worth reading again, and again, and again. I'm fairly hard pressed to think of anything made by man or nature that is not covered in one of these catch-all categories. At the recent ACCG meeting held during the ANA convention in Los Angeles, I met a gentleman who collects cactus -- or is it cacti? I was a bit shocked when he related to me the story of how UNESCO 1970 has impacted his rather esoteric hobby. George Orwell got it right for the most part, he just had the date wrong.

Many collectors of modern World Coins have complacently ignored the plight of those who collect truly "ancient" coins and who are under constant attack from nationalist ideologues. But this arrest in India ought to be a wake-up call to even the most sedentary collector of anything older than their great-grandparent. It's called repressive legislation and it is a wide-sweeping draconian response to a very specific problem -- one might say an Orwellian fix. Are American collectors immune to this sort of oppression? Hardly. Ideological fervor is a potent and potentially dangerous aspect of society and it can become global in what history would quantify as a heartbeat. We should perhaps ask ourselves, "What would Victoria think about all of this?"