Coins and Metal-Detected Finds: The Small-Find Trade in Cypriot Antiquities

Coins and small metal objects are the part of the trade in Cypriot antiquities where the argument that looting barely pays is weakest. A silver stater of a Cypriot king fits in a palm, was struck in hundreds or thousands from the same dies, travelled across the eastern Mediterranean in antiquity and carries no mark of where it was found. A metal detector finds it without opening a tomb, and a deep collectors' market buys it on a photograph. The same is true, on a smaller scale, of bronze fibulae, seals, rings and arrowheads. This entry sets out what the small-find trade is, what it pays, what the record in the Republic of Cyprus shows about detectors and coin seizures, and, as its counterpart, the very large lawful stock of Cypriot coins that left the island in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from hoards published at the time and from colonial and museum collections. It ends with the evidence against the section's case, which on this subject is strong, and what it means for a coin on the market today.

What the small-find trade covers

The coinage of Cyprus begins in the late sixth century BC with the silver of the city-kingdoms, and the American import list of 2007 names the mints as clearly as any handbook: "the ancient kingdoms of Amathus, Kition, Kourion, Idalion, Lapethos, Marion, Paphos, Soli, and Salamis dating from the end of the 6th century B.C. to 332 B.C." [14, p. 38473]. Gold followed in the fourth century, under Evagoras I of Salamis and his successors, and is the subject of Evangéline Markou's corpus L'or des rois de Chypre [10]. After the kingdoms came the Ptolemaic mints of Paphos, Salamis and Kition, and then the provincial issues of the Roman period, which the same list describes as often showing "a bust or head on one side and the image of a temple (the Temple of Aphrodite at Palaipaphos) or statue (statue of Zeus Salaminios) on the other" [14, p. 38473]. The coins themselves are described in coins of ancient Cyprus.

The non-coin small finds are a looser group: bronze and iron fibulae, finger rings, stamp and cylinder seals, arrowheads and spearheads, weights, and lead seals of the Byzantine period. They have no corpus of the kind coins have. Most sell in mixed lots at the lower end of the market, described by type and period, almost never by site.

Four features set the whole group apart from the pottery that fills most Cypriot sales. The objects are small, so they cross borders in a pocket or an envelope. They are numerous, because a die struck the same image again and again. They circulated: a stater of Salamis could be lost in Egypt or Syria in antiquity, so a Cypriot type does not prove a Cypriot findspot. And the trade has, for two centuries, described coins by type and die rather than by where they were found, so a coin with no recorded findspot looks like every other coin in the catalogue.

What coins and small finds sell for

In our own unpublished research, 153 sold lots of Cypriot staters have a median price of about $950, with the middle half between about $275 and $1,925. At the house that sells most of them, staters made on average about 1.7 times their estimate, at a time when ordinary Cypriot pottery at online venues often sold under estimate. The best examples reach five figures: a gold stater of about 351 to 332 BC made $90,000 against an estimate of $30,000; a silver stater of about 450 BC with a cow suckling a calf made £24,000 against £3,000 to £5,000; a silver stater of Paphos of about 500 to 480 BC made $24,000; and two Ptolemaic gold pieces of a Cyprus mint made $16,000 and $12,000. Bronze coins are much cheaper, with a median of about $130 in a sample of 93 lots.

These figures sit above the ordinary Cypriot pot. The median sold vessel, in a sample of 2,168, makes about $820, and most of it sells at cheap venues, as set out in the economics of looting. A silver stater is worth about as much as a good jug, weighs eleven grams and can be found with a detector in an afternoon. A gold coin of the Salamis kings can be worth more than most Cypriot sculpture. That is the difference between this trade and the trade in Bronze Age pottery, and it is why the section's economic case does not carry over to coins.

The record in Cyprus: detectors and coin seizures

The Antiquities Law treats a metal detector as a licensed instrument. Under s. 10(4) of Cap. 31 a person may not possess a detector without the written licence of the Director of Antiquities, or use or carry one outside areas the Minister designates, on pain of up to three years in prison or a €30,000 fine [15]. The finder's duty to declare, the gratuity and the penalties for undeclared finds are set out in chance finds and opportunistic digging, and the work of the police and Department in policing and monitoring; neither is repeated here.

What matters for this entry is how often coins and detectors appear in the southern cases. The answers given to Parliament for 2012 to early 2018, as reported in Politis, list 67 complaints, of which five were metal-detector cases; among the seizures are 810 coins with 16 other objects from one person in Larnaca in May 2012, 800 coins in a Larnaca house the same month, and 148 coins in Larnaca in June 2015 [16]. When the European operation Pandora ran in November 2016, the Cyprus police reported 44 searches, 1,383 objects and 13 metal detectors seized, and at one house in Mouttagiaka "22 copper coins from Roman and early Christian times" [17]. The one organised southern ring broken in the period, in Limassol and Paphos in January 2010, held "a large number of coins and seals" beside its pottery and statuettes [19]. The latest case on record is a 41-year-old man arrested near the Palaipaphos site at Kouklia in September 2026 with a metal detector and a pickaxe [18].

The pattern is consistent. The typical modern offender in the south is one man with a detector near a known site, or a household with a jar of coins, and the typical seizure is counted in coins. Customs has also found single ancient coins in the post, as set out in policing and monitoring.

Abroad, the change came in 2007. When the United States extended its import restrictions on Cypriot material, it added a subcategory, "Coins of Cypriot Types", at the request of the Republic, on the ground that "Coins constitute an inseparable part of the archaeological record of the island, and, like other archaeological objects, they are vulnerable to pillage and illicit export" [14, p. 38471]; how the restrictions work, and the coin collectors' challenge to them, belong to the American law.

Meanwhile, lawfully: the hoards found and published before 1970

Against the coins dug and detected since 1974 stands a lawful stock found, published and divided long before, much of it in a few large hoards. The Inventory of Greek Coin Hoards of 1973 and its online continuation list some sixty hoards from Cyprus [1]. The largest were recorded at the time of discovery, published in the numismatic journals within a few years, and divided between the Cyprus Museum and museums abroad.

The Larnaca hoard is the clearest case. It was found in 1933 while foundations were dug for a new wing of the local hospital and contained coins of Kition, Idalion, Lapethos, Paphos and Salamis [4, p. 170]. Of about 700 staters, 463 are recorded in Nicosia, with small groups in London, New York and the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris [1]. Every one of those coins has a lawful history that begins in a published hoard, and the coins that left the island did so under the colonial law of the day.

Two of the hoards in the table were found in places now in the occupied north: Vouni, near Lefka, and Galatia in the Karpass. Both were excavated or declared, and taken wholly or in part into the Cyprus Museum, decades before the Turkish invasion of 1974. A coin of Marion or of a Ptolemaic mint found in the north is not, for that reason, northern loot, any more than a Vounous pot is; the distinction is set out in northern types with lawful histories.

The nineteenth-century hoards need one qualification. Lawful title is not lawful excavation in the modern sense. The Dali finds of 1869 were turned up by villagers and bought from them. Robert Hamilton Lang, the British consul who bought one of them, recalled how "five young men who were working in the hope of gaining a shilling or two a day stumbled upon a treasure which brought them about £800" [7, p. 338], and how it passed through his hands to buyers in Constantinople and Britain is told in tomb digging in Ottoman Cyprus. The Ottoman regulation of 1869 forbade the export of finds from authorised excavations with the single exception of coins, as set out in firmans and partage. Coins were the one class of find that the Ottoman law let leave the Empire.

Colonial and museum collections, and the duplicates that left them

The second part of the lawful stock is the great nineteenth-century collections. The Cesnola Collection, bought by subscription for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1874 to 1876, included coins; John Myres's handbook of 1914 lists, among others, small gold fractions of Evagoras I of Salamis such as this twentieth of a stater [8, p. 398]. The British Museum, which received about 440 coins of one of the Dali hoards [1], holds the series published by George Francis Hill in 1904, still the standard catalogue of the coins of Cyprus [9]. The Cabinet des Médailles in Paris, whose half-stater of Pumayyaton of Kition heads this page, holds the French national series, catalogued by Ernest Babelon in 1893. These are the reference series: when a stater appears on the market, it is identified by its number in Hill or by a die match to a coin in Paris, London or New York.

Duplicates left these collections in the ordinary course. The clearest documented case is the collection of Charles Gunther of the Cyprus Mines Corporation. After his death his heir gave most of the coins to the American Numismatic Society in New York; they were exported over four years, from 1949 to 1953, through George McFadden, and 395 coins that were "examples not already held in the museum's collection" were kept by the Cyprus Museum [6, p. 8]. The Museum's guide records seventy-one silver coins of the kingdoms presented by the Society as the Charles C. Gunther Memorial Collection, and adds that "The Society retains the remainder of the coins collected in Cyprus by the late Charles C. Gunther, which are duplicated in the Museum's Collection" [4, p. 170]. The same guide records two Ptolemaic hoards bought by the Museum in 1948 and 1949 from a seller in Larnaca, "of unknown source but probably from Citium" [4, p. 170]. The Museum was a buyer of coins as well as a keeper of them.

The buying continued after 1974. The Bank of Cyprus built a coin collection, which its Cultural Foundation inherited, and its curators wrote in 2001 of their acquisitions: "We purchase from authorised dealers" [20, p. 60]. That purchase, with the other state and foundation buying, is listed in the state as buyer.

How a coin's history is documented

Coins have a better paper record than most antiquities, but of a different kind. A pot is traced through a find number, an export permit or a collection label. A coin is traced through the printed sale catalogue and the die study.

The old sale catalogues of the coin trade, from the late nineteenth century on, illustrate the better coins on plates. A collection such as Robert Jameson's, catalogued in Paris in four volumes, gives each coin a number and a photograph, and that photograph is a fingerprint: a coin's flan, wear and die flaws can be matched to the same coin a century later. Modern coin catalogues give the chain as "ex" entries, sale by sale, and a coin that carries a sale of 1962 or a plate in an old collection catalogue has a history that no recent find can share.

Die studies do the same work from the other side. A numismatist who gathers every known specimen of a mint, as Jonathan Kagan did for the Archaic and Early Classical coinage of Kourion [11] and Markou did for the gold of the kings [10], records each coin's present location and its earlier appearances in sales. Michel Amandry's Chronique numismatique chypriote, published in five parts from 1998 to 2015, records the Cypriot coins that appeared at public sales or in public and private collections in each period, beside a bibliography of the field [12, p. 429]. For a Cypriot stater of any rarity, then, the published record often shows when it first appeared.

The gap is at the common end. A bronze coin of the Ptolemies, or a worn silver fraction, will rarely have been photographed in an old catalogue or included in a die study, and many lots are sold as groups. For those, the only history is the owner's paper: a dealer's invoice, a collection ticket, an inventory or a family record of when and where it was bought.

The evidence against the section's case

On this subject the evidence against the section's argument is strong, and it is set out here in full.

The first point is that coins pay. A silver stater is worth more than most Cypriot pots and a gold one more than most Cypriot sculpture; a detectorist who finds a handful of staters in a field near Kouklia has made more than a tomb robber who fills a sack with Bronze Age juglets. The low median price of Cypriot pottery, which carries most of the section's economic case, does not apply.

The second is that findspots are invisible. A coin of a Cypriot type may have been found anywhere from Egypt to Anatolia, and the coin trade has argued exactly that against the American restrictions. The same fact cuts the other way: a coin dug last year near Palaipaphos is indistinguishable from a coin found in Syria in 1900. The 1974 date-line on which the market relies for pottery depends on paper, and most coins have none.

The third is that hoards appear on the market without findspots. Hoards have been published from the trade under regional descriptions, of which Kagan's Archaic Greek coin hoard from the Eastern Mediterranean is an example [13]. Such a publication records the coins but not where or when they were found, and a hoard of this kind may or may not have left its country lawfully.

The fourth is the record itself. The Cypriot seizures are counted in hundreds of coins, not in pots, and they come from the same places as the pottery cases. A collector culture that bought coins locally, outside the auction market, existed before 1974 and still exists; Hardy's argument that much of the material collected on the island between 1963 and 1973 was dug illicitly applies to coins as much as to pottery, as set out in collecting under the silent accord. The detector is the one tool that has made illicit digging easier since 1974.

The record answers these points only in part. The southern cases are small: one man and one detector, a house with coins, and no organised ring recorded since 2010. The lawful stock is very large, with single hoards of 500 and 700 coins divided and published before 1940, and the reference collections in London, Paris and New York were formed in the nineteenth century. For rare coins the die studies and sale records make a recent find conspicuous by its absence from the record. But for common silver fractions and bronze coins, and for fibulae, rings and arrowheads, the record cannot tell a coin found in 1890 from one found in 2020. This is the class where illicit digging can still make money, in Cyprus as elsewhere in the Mediterranean, and the section does not claim otherwise.

What this means for a coin or small find on the market today

A Cypriot coin with a printed history, a plate in an old collection catalogue, a place in a die study or a sale record before the 1970s, has the lawful history that most coins in the great museum series also have. A coin with nothing but a description is not proof of looting, since millions of coins circulated without paper for a century, but it is the class of Cypriot antiquity most likely to be a recent find, and it is the class to which the American import restrictions have applied since 2007. Small bronzes and rings sold in mixed lots are in the same position.

In Cyprus itself, a metal detector needs the Director's licence, and a coin found in a field is a chance find to be declared, as chance finds and opportunistic digging explains. Outside Cyprus, an owner of Cypriot coins inherited or bought long ago should keep every invoice, ticket and catalogue reference, which is what provenance versus provenience means in practice, and can check the American position in selling Cypriot antiquities in the US. Whether a particular coin or group can be sold, and how, depends on its history and where it is now. In every case the next step is to contact us or send photographs through identify, and we will help work out what the paper shows.