Comments Open On Upcoming Mous

Thank you for the warm welcome! You are correct about the government overreach and how coins circulated. I have spent years studying countermarks/counterstamps. You can physically see where a coin has been, it's kind of like looking at a passport!!!

So let them hear our voices!!! If no one speaks up then certainly nothing will change. We need all the help we can get.

Flamdrag99: to the CCF !
As most collectors of ancient coins already know,
the VCOINS website has 130 professional dealers of ancient coins worldwide using this website. There are well over 100,000 ancient coins currently at any one time listed for sale.

What the US Customs are proposing to police would, be in fact impossible to police.
The ultimate implication would be that If the US customs were to be 100 % successful. all of the museums and all collectors of Roman coins World wide, would be have their collections be declared illegal, and all coins repatriated back to Italy.

Without compensation. The sum total value of those collections would be far too large a payout for the Italian Government to pay.

World famous collections that have been for centuries custodians of Roman coins, such as that at of the ANS, the British Museum, the Bibliotheque Nationale, the Hermitage Museum in Moscow, the Hunterian Museum, would be illegally held, not to mention the many millions of Roman coins around the World held in private collections.

It must also be remembered that Italy is not the Roman Empire, and hundreds of millions of Roman Empire coins were not minted in Italy.

I fully support what the IPAN is trying to protect.

Maybe I am missing something.

When I follow the links to the Federal Register item, it looks like the proposal is only to continue what is already in place.

So, what's the big deal?

Will anything actually change?

There is indeed already an MOU including ancient coins with Italy. The issue is the expansion of the definition of what an "Italian coin" is.

Right now, coins must be "of Italian type" to come under the already-existing MOU. So, coins from the early Republic, or Carthaginian Sicily, or the old Greek colonies in southern Italy, are covered. These are all coins that are known to have been originally made in Italy and are unlikely to have ever left Italy in ancient times. Thus, "of Italian type". And it's fair enough that Italy wants to control and police the exportation of its own cultural heritage.

The new expanded definition allows scope to include virtually any Roman coin as "Italian". Even if the coins themselves were never actually in Italy.

Example: in the early Imperial period, the primary Roman mint was moved out of Rome to the city of Lugdunum (modern-day Lyons, in France), where it stayed for over a hundred years. Most "Roman" coins from this time period weren't actually struck in Rome, or anywhere else in modern-day Italy. Large numbers of those coins would have eventually found their way back to Italy, but many would have stayed in France to pay the local troops, or been shipped to other provinces. So let's suppose you find a Roman coin for sale in southern France and attempt to import it into the US under the new MOU. As far as can be archaeologically ascertained, this coin has never left France before and there's certainly no evidence that it was ever physically in Italy. Yet under this MOU, it would be "repatriated" to Italy if you don't have a certificate from the Italian government allowing you to own it. Which, of course, the Italian government is never going to give you.

In essence, the "problem" with these MOUs is the presumption of guilt, rather than presumption of innocence. If you can't prove the coin wasn't stolen, then the assumption is that it was. A receipt from a coin dealer is insufficient proof, because the assumption will be that the coin dealer stole it.

The entire reason and end goal of introducing these MOUs is to completely shut down the international coin trade, or at least make it so difficult and bureaucratic to buy coins from overseas that most coin collectors simply give up. They want to kill demand for ancient coins from US collectors, because it's that demand that's helping to pump up high prices and (they believe) encouraging looting.

I'm not so worried about pursuing it as I am that existing collections might be confiscated under the auspices of "cultural repatriation." Although I consider that to be very unlikely, the probability is non-zero.

I know of many republican denarius and asses that were found here in Portugal. They circulated widely within the early empire. The bad debasement of the coinage happened later.

This overreach is intended only as a form of taxation on the hobby. Italy has more than enough coins stuffed in museums. Now they want to be able to sell licenses to own them. And to grab the more valuable coins. Or extort from their owners.

All european countries that were not victims of recent pillage have extensive public collections of local coins. Spain was a sad example of pillage. During the civil war they lost many coins. Italian collections survived well the wold war two.
There is no need to acquire new finds for museums. There is a need to have new finds declared and studied when found. Good laws like that of britain, rewarding the finder justly, solve the problem. If any new patrimony in Italy is not being declared that is only due to the greed and incompetence of the italian state. Is is within their power and their alone to fix that. Other countries seizing and sending coins there does not end undeclared finds. Increased state extortion from owners of coins will only cause owners to avoid declaring anything to the state.