I Inherited Antiquities: What to Do First, Step by Step

A wooden box made for Dutch liqueur chocolates holds five potsherds, each clipped to a drilled mount by a loop of soft wire. A small handwritten label reads "Neolithic. Painted and combed ware. c. 3500 BC." The date is about a thousand years too young (radiocarbon has since put Cypriot Combed ware at roughly 4500 to 3900 BC), but the label, the clips and the box stayed with the sherds, and they are part of how the group was identified and traced to the colonial judge who collected it, a story told in The Judge, the Escape, and a Chocolate Box.

Most inherited antiquities arrive like that: a box, a cabinet shelf, a few pots wrapped in newspaper, and a family story that is half remembered. This page covers the first steps for antiquities of any origin, Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Near Eastern or Cypriot, and then helps you work out whether yours are Cypriot, since Cypriot pottery and figurines are among the commonest antiquities in old British and American family collections. If you already know you want to sell, the companion guide on how to sell antiquities legally covers the law and the process.

What should I do first with inherited antiquities?

Leave everything as it is, record it, and gather the paper. The commonest damage to an inherited collection happens in the first weeks, when well-meaning heirs wash pots, throw away scruffy labels, or divide the pieces among relatives before anyone has looked at them. Four rules cover most of it.

1. Do not clean, glue or "restore" anything. Burial deposits, old repairs and faded paint are evidence. A Cypriot pot that has been scrubbed can lose its slip and its painted lines along with the dirt, and fresh glue hides the old restoration a specialist needs to see.
2. Do not split groups or separate objects from their mounts, boxes or stands. A pair of juglets bought together on one licence, or five sherds in one box, carry more information as a set than they will ever carry apart. If relatives each want a piece, record the whole group first.
3. Photograph every object where it sits, then individually: front, back, base and any marks, with a ruler in the frame and plain light. Photograph the cabinet or box as a whole too, since a shelf arrangement can show what was bought together.
4. Keep every scrap of paper until someone who knows what it is has seen it.

The fourth rule matters most, because the paper and the marks on the objects are the provenance, the documented history of where a piece has been, and that history decides what can be done with it later. Look on the objects themselves and in drawers, envelopes and old files for:

• Small labels and tickets. Typed or handwritten slips glued to a base, sometimes with a date, a place name or a price. In the Cyprus Museum saleroom of the late 1920s, Rupert Gunnis had tickets lettered for the duplicates on sale, each carrying a date [7].
• Numbers painted or inked on the object. Museum accession numbers, collection inventory numbers and auction lot numbers were all written directly on pots, often in white or black ink on the base or lower body. A number such as 74.51 followed by more digits is a Metropolitan Museum Cesnola number [6].
• Lead seals. A small disc of lead, stamped and wired through a handle, is the Cyprus Museum's export tag: the physical receipt of a legal export from Cyprus [2]. Many have been removed over the years "largely for aesthetic reasons" [3]. If one survives, leave it on.
• Export licences and receipts. A typed government permit listing objects by number; a dealer's receipt or stock list; a saleroom register number such as "S.R. 3477/65".
• Indirect evidence. Auction catalogues with a lot marked in pencil, insurance schedules, probate inventories, letters, diaries, and photographs that show the objects on a mantelpiece with a datable room or person.

What these marks look like on Cypriot material, and how to read them, is set out in the guide to Cypriot export licences, lead seals and labels. If you are an executor or solicitor dealing with antiquities in an estate, the guide for executors covers inventories, probate valuation and the order in which to do things.

Is it legal to own inherited antiquities?

In the United Kingdom, the United States and the European Union, simply owning an antiquity you inherited is generally lawful; the legal questions arise when it is sold, exported or imported. Two kinds of rule come into play at that point. The first is the law of the country of origin: many countries vest archaeological finds in the state, Cyprus among them since its Antiquities Law of 1935, which today forbids export without a licence and forbids dealing in antiquities on the island [2]. The second is the 1970 UNESCO Convention, a treaty between states that entered into force on 24 April 1972 and is not retroactive; its import ban and return mechanism apply to objects stolen from an inventoried museum or monument after the Convention came into force for both countries concerned [1]. Museums and auction houses have since adopted 1970 as the date before which they want an object's history documented. How these rules work in the British, American and EU markets is set out in how to sell antiquities legally. This page is general information, not legal advice; for a specific object, a cultural-property lawyer is the person to ask.

Is my antiquity Cypriot?

If your family lived in or visited the eastern Mediterranean, or bought antiquities in Britain or America before about 1980, there is a fair chance some of what you have is Cypriot. The volumes explain why. Luigi Palma di Cesnola removed more than 30,000 objects from the island in the 1870s [4]. His brother Alessandro and Edwin Lawrence sold more than 14,000 Cypriot objects in four Sotheby's sales in London between 1883 and 1892 [5]. The Metropolitan Museum sold its Cesnola "duplicates" between 1916 and 1928, the last of them at the Anderson Galleries in New York [6]. The British Museum distributed duplicate finds from its 1890s excavations at Amathus, Kourion and Enkomi to schools, universities and provincial museums across Britain, some of which later sold them [5]. The Cyprus Museum ran a saleroom of its own duplicates from 1926 [7], and between 1935 and the late 1970s the Department of Antiquities issued on the order of seven thousand export licences, some covering dozens of objects each [3]. Colonial officials, soldiers, teachers and tourists carried the results home, as described in Brought home from Cyprus.

Most of what reached family cabinets is pottery, with smaller numbers of terracotta figurines, limestone heads, lamps and glass. The table gives the quick visual tells; the full key, ware by ware with photographs, is in How to Identify Ancient Cypriot Pottery.

Some things in an old Cyprus collection will not look specifically Cypriot. Roman glass bottles, iridescent from burial, and Roman clay oil lamps were sold on the island in large numbers and are often genuinely from Cyprus, but similar pieces were made all over the Roman world, so the paperwork matters more than the look. Wheel-made black-gloss or black-figure vases are usually Greek, and plain buff jars bought in Jerusalem or Beirut can resemble Cypriot Plain White ware. Then there are copies: museum-shop and tourist reproductions of Red Polished jugs and Bichrome amphorae, often stamped on the base, and nineteenth-century pots so heavily restored that they are partly modern. The guide to Cypriot replicas, restorations and fakes explains how to tell, and what a thermoluminescence test can and cannot settle.

If the table and the identification guide leave you unsure, send us photos. We have identified well over 200 pieces for owners so far, and a front, back and base view with a ruler is usually enough for a first answer.

My pieces are Cypriot: what now?

Start with the guide to owning Cypriot antiquities, which explains what a Cypriot piece in a family collection usually is, how it most likely left the island, and what your options are. The short version of the history is that most Cypriot material abroad left legally, through excavation shares, licensed dealers such as Petros Kolokasides, the Cyprus Museum's own saleroom and the numbered licences described in Licence No. 7070. Lawful private export from Cyprus effectively ended in 1996 [2]. The looting that does shadow the subject is real and concentrated after 1974, above all in the cemeteries of the occupied north such as Lapithos and Bellapais-Vounous, which is why a fine Early Bronze Age Red Polished vessel with no history before 1974 draws closer questions than a Cypro-Archaic juglet with a lead seal.

Should I keep, sell, donate or return inherited antiquities?

Any of the four can be right, and the paperwork you have just gathered usually decides which are open to you.

Keeping a documented heirloom needs nothing more than care: a stable shelf away from radiators and damp, no sticky labels or tape on the surface, and a file of the photographs and papers kept with the objects, so the next heir does not start from nothing.

Selling is lawful for most pieces with a sound history and is covered in how to sell antiquities legally; for a Cypriot collection, selling inherited Cypriot artifacts goes step by step. What a piece is likely to fetch depends heavily on ware, condition and provenance, which What Is My Cypriot Antiquity Worth? sets out with real auction results.

Donating to a museum is possible, though many museums now decline antiquities that cannot show a documented history before 1970, and a donation is easier to arrange with the file assembled first.

Returning a piece to its country of origin is a voluntary choice for most inherited material, and for anything with a doubtful recent history it may be the right one. How voluntary return and museum donation work for Cypriot pieces, and what happens to the donor, is explained in returning or donating Cypriot antiquities.

Is it genuine, and what is it worth?

Both questions need the object, or good photographs of it, in front of someone who knows the class: authenticity in Cypriot pottery is usually settled by fabric, firing, wear and the logic of the decoration before any laboratory test, and price follows the class, the condition and the paperwork. A formal valuation for probate, insurance or sale comes from an independent appraiser.

How can AncientCyprus.com help?

AncientCyprus.com is a free, non-commercial site run by the Antiquity Preservation Fund, and owners write to us more than we expected. We identify Cypriot and neighbouring antiquities from photographs at no charge, help trace provenance from labels, numbers and family papers, explain the options open to you, and point you to appraisers, conservators and cultural-property lawyers where you need one. We do not sell or broker antiquities, issue formal valuations, or give legal advice.