Wednesday 13 October 2010

ACCG (?) Greek Coin Finds Study

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At the CPAC hearing on Tuesday Peter Tompa speaking on behalf of the IPN and IAPN made reference to ."Our Greek Coin Finds study", although he does not say whose "study" it is and where it available for scrutiny. Apparently according to it,
"coins struck in Greece and found elsewhere must account for some 18% of the estimated 350,000,000, or more ancient coins of the entire Greek world extant".

Three hundred and fifty million Greek coins "extant"? What does that mean? Minted in total in the past, or minted, circulated, buried and dug up? How is that figure calculated? ZOr is it just off the top of some coin dealer's head? (they call themselves "professional numismatists" let us see a professional presentation of the reasoning and data behind these figures).



But even if 350 million 'Greek' coins extant in the market and collections is enough (and let us note that US coin dealers want to import more, and more) and we are asked to believe that they come for the most part from "old collections", what can we determine about those old collections in the days when this was just a "hobby of kings"? Where were 350 million coins curated in 1800 for example? In royal coin cabinets? All of them? Or have some (many) of them in fact been dug up from archaeological sites since then? How many, where and when?

Is it not the case that the vast majority of those 350 estimated Greek coins "extant" today never formed a part of any hypothetical royal collection but have in fact been dug up and put on the market in comparatively recent years, in other words well after coin collecting was (if it ever was) the province of monarchs and became the domain of blokes trading from grubby paperless cubby holes through the internet?

I hope we will soon be able to see the IPN/IAPN Greek Coin Finds Study to which Tompa refers, preferably published in a peer-reviewed numismatic journal.

[I wonder about the value of the main thesis: if "only 18% of the sportswear sold in the US by a well-known sportswear company were produced in east Asian sweatshops employing enforced child labour"... is that something to be concerned about, or is it a statistic so insignificant that it can be ignored by US public opinion? ]

Graph:A graphic representation of World population figures. How many coin collectors were there in 1700, 1800, 1900?

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