Cypriot Antiquities in the Internet Era: Online Sales, Platforms and Checking a History Online

The internet changed the trade in Cypriot antiquities in two directions at once. From the late 1990s eBay, and then the bidding platforms that carry hundreds of small salerooms, put ordinary Cypriot pots, figures and coins in front of buyers everywhere, with little or nothing said about where they came from. The same decades put the lawful record online: nineteenth- and twentieth-century sale catalogues, the collection catalogues of the museums that hold the largest Cypriot holdings abroad, and the Department of Antiquities' own archive of registered collections and old export licences. The first change made it easier to offer an undocumented piece; the second made it easier for anyone, the Department included, to check one. This page sets the two side by side. Most Cypriot antiquities sold online today are ordinary pieces of the classes that left the island lawfully in quantity before 1996, and many come from old collections and estates. Undocumented material and fakes collect at the cheapest venues, because the major houses ask for a history that can be checked, and those cheap venues are where the Department finds most of what it asks to have withdrawn. The plate at the head of the page comes from a Sotheby's sale catalogue of November 1926, now online through the Metropolitan Museum's library: three Cypriot Iron Age vessels painted with birds and animals, lots 18, 22 and 31 [5].

eBay and the first online market

Brodie dates the first secure online retail sale to August 1994 and the launch of eBay, the internet auction site, to the following year [2, p. 237]. For antiquities the change was one of scale and of who could sell. eBay let a private person put an object up for auction without a dealer, a catalogue or a specialist; within a few years specialised "virtual galleries" and what Efthymia Alphas of the Department of Antiquities calls "Internet Malls or Marketplaces", single websites linking many dealers, sold antiquities at a fixed price or by auction [1, p. 33]. For Cypriot material Alphas dates the change to eBay, "launched in the late 1990s, and the subsequent global craze of online purchases", after which "the market environment has dramatically changed" [1, p. 33].

eBay's response came platform by platform. Brodie records that several governments, "including Germany, Switzerland, France, Austria, the United Kingdom, and the United States", reached agreements with eBay on rules meant to stop the sale of illicit material, but that these agreements were "generally aimed only at antiquities originating in the country served by the associated national eBay platform" [2, p. 243]. eBay UK restricted only objects protected under the law of the United Kingdom or Ireland. eBay USA was the exception: it treated antiquities as items that "can come from anywhere in the world" and asked for an image of an official document showing legal sale and export or import [2, p. 243]. Brodie judged the effect limited, since the rules sat "hidden away in an A-Z index" and "it would be possible to buy and sell antiquities without being aware of the policy" [2, p. 243]. A Cypriot pot listed on a national eBay site outside the United States therefore fell under no Cypriot-specific rule at all.

A survey of fifteen eBay antiquities sellers published in 2019 shows what that meant in practice. Lauren Dundler found that only three engaged with the legal framework at all, that three gave no provenance information whatever, and that none of the provenance offered by one seller who issued "authentic" certificates could be verified [3, p. 2318]. Across the fifteen sellers the statements were unverifiable, with two exceptions, and one of the two was Cypriot: a limestone head offered at $1,000 by a US seller, previously in a private North Carolina collection and sold "with export documents from the Cypriot Government" dated to about the 1990s, two papers that "demonstrated the legal acquisition of this piece" [3, pp. 2318–2319]. One of the two verifiable histories in the whole sample rested on Cypriot export papers.

Bidding platforms and online galleries

Most Cypriot antiquities now sold online are not sold on eBay. They pass through bidding platforms such as LiveAuctioneers, Invaluable, Catawiki and Drouot's online service, which carry the sales of hundreds of independent salerooms, from regional general auctioneers to specialist antiquities houses, and through online galleries that sell from their own websites. The platforms are a means of bidding; the saleroom that consigns the lot writes the catalogue entry and is responsible for it. A Cypriot jug in a country sale in Devon or Ohio, which before the late 1990s would have been seen by the people in the room and a few postal bidders, is now visible worldwide on the day the catalogue is posted.

That visibility works on both sides of the record. It gives a small house's consignor an international audience. It also puts every catalogue entry in front of the Department of Antiquities, which, in Alphas's words, carries out its online search for Cypriot antiquities "on a daily basis" [1, p. 33]. The withdrawals and returns of 2024 to 2026 described on policing and monitoring were nearly all of lots found this way, at regional and online salerooms, and the Department's announcements describe them as discoveries at online auctions. That page sets out the cases and the procedure; the point here is the channel. A sale that once took place in a provincial room unseen by Nicosia now takes place on a screen that the Department watches.

Social media

Antiquities are also offered through social-media groups and private messages, outside any auction. The published research on this channel concerns the Middle East and North Africa, not Cyprus. The best known study, the ATHAR Project's report Facebook's Black Market in Antiquities (2019) by Amr Al-Azm and Katie Paul, followed 95 Arabic-language Facebook groups with 488 administrators, whose buyers were, as reported, "located predominantly in West Asia (and secondarily in North Africa)" [4]. Dundler's 2019 survey found eBay sellers using Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to advertise their eBay sales rather than to sell directly [3, p. 2318]. No comparable published study of Cypriot material on social media has been found, and this page makes no claim about its scale.

Where undocumented pieces and fakes now appear

Alphas's account of the Department's first year of systematic monitoring is the clearest published description of what the online market holds. Of "more than 200 Cypriot archaeological objects identified online" between September 2015 and September 2016, "only a few examples have a clear, solid and what seems to be legitimate acquisition history"; most had "no acquisition history at all (especially objects posted on eBay)" or a vague one, "very few cases provide information that reaches 1970", and only a small number gave evidence of lawful removal from Cyprus [1, pp. 34–35]. The classes she lists as popular online are Early to Late Bronze Age pottery and figurines and Cypro-Geometric to Cypro-Archaic pottery, sculpture and figurines [1, p. 34]. She also notes a limit on what can be identified at all: for Roman glass, pottery, jewellery and tools, common across the Mediterranean, "it is practically impossible to deduce the modern country from which they came", and Hellenistic or Roman jewellery of Cypriot types is often sold as "Eastern Greek" [1, p. 34].

Prices explain why undocumented material collects at the bottom of the market. In our own unpublished research on public auction results, 482 sold Cypriot lots other than coins were recorded for 2023 to 2026. Of these, 439, about nine in ten, sold at venues other than Christie's, Sotheby's and Bonhams, at a median of about $400; the 43 sold at those three houses made a median of about $3,780. In the same research, several of the larger online antiquities houses sell only 40 to 50 per cent of the Cypriot lots they offer, often under estimate. The price bands by class are on the economics of looting. An object with no history cannot pass the major houses' checks, so it goes where the checks are lightest and the prices lowest, and the same objects with good papers can be sold at a higher level.

Fakes follow the same route. Alphas reports that most cultural objects detained by Cyprus Customs "have been bought via the internet" and that there is "a growing occurrence of cases involving fake antiquities" [1, p. 33]. Brodie, writing of the wider online market, records the view of other authors that only the more blatant fakes are sold on eBay, while more convincing forgeries and pastiches go through other dealers to richer buyers [2, p. 243]. For Cypriot pottery the commoner problem at the cheap end is the honest modern replica or souvenir, sold as such once and later catalogued as ancient, and the genuine pot that has been restored or "improved"; the article on Cypriot pottery replicas and fakes sets out how to tell them apart and what a thermoluminescence test can and cannot show.

The Department of Antiquities' monitoring

The monitoring is described in detail on policing and monitoring, and the table of withdrawals and returns is there; a summary is enough here. When an archaeological officer finds a Cypriot object offered online, it is filed and checked against the Department's archives of stolen and missing objects, most of them lost after the Turkish invasion from museums, excavation stores and registered private collections in the occupied north [1, p. 34]. Alphas describes the work as time-consuming, needing archaeological and often legal knowledge, and short of staff [1, p. 34]. The Deputy Minister of Culture said in December 2024 that the Department had digitised the records of the private collections, so that they could be passed to Interpol "so that we can claim them more easily if any of these items appear on the market" [7]. The same monitoring that finds objects to claim also confirms objects with good papers, as the next section shows.

The lawful record online

The other result of the internet era is that a lawful history can now be checked from a desk. Five kinds of record matter for Cypriot antiquities.

Digitised sale catalogues. The nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sales through which much of the lawful stock reached collectors are increasingly online. The two parts of the Anderson Galleries catalogue of the Metropolitan Museum's last sales of Cesnola duplicates, New York, 30–31 March and 21–22 April 1928, are on the Internet Archive [6]; so is the Sotheby's sale of Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Cypriot antiquities of 11–12 November 1926, scanned from the Met library's copy, with its plates of Cypriot vessels [5]. Older and later Sotheby's and Christie's catalogues are held in research libraries, and the houses publish their own results online for recent decades. A lot number, an illustration or a dimension in one of these catalogues can tie a piece in a family's possession to a public sale before 1970, and in the case of the Cesnola sales to a known excavation era. The history of the Cyprus Museum's own sales explains the other main source of early lawful stock.

Museum collections online. The Metropolitan Museum publishes its Cesnola collection online with accession numbers, and the 74.51 series of numbers, or a label from the 1928 sale, is one of the strongest provenances a Cypriot object can carry. The British Museum publishes the finds of its Cyprus excavations and its registration history; the Medelhavsmuseet in Stockholm, which holds the Swedish Cyprus Expedition's share of the 1927–31 finds, publishes its records in the Carlotta catalogue; the Ashmolean and the Fitzwilliam publish theirs through their collections online and data service. These matter to a private owner in two ways. They show the classes and shapes that left the island lawfully in quantity, and they record the deaccessions and exchanges through which museum pieces entered private hands.

Excavation publications. The Swedish Cyprus Expedition's volumes and the reports of the British and other foreign missions publish tomb groups with drawings and photographs, and the Department of Antiquities has put its own Annual Reports for a number of years online [11]. A piece that matches a published object is not thereby proved to be that object, but a match is a lead that the Department and a museum can follow.

Export licences and registered collections. The Department keeps copies of the export licences it issued before the 1996 amendment, and every time an object appears online with a Cypriot licence the licence can be checked [1, p. 37]. Alphas gives the example of a Red Polished jug offered at Bonhams on 2 October 2014, catalogued as acquired in 1964 "accompanied by a copy of the Cypriot Government export license dated 20/10/1964"; the Department's list of licences showed a Bronze Age jug bought for eight Cyprus pounds from an authorised dealer on 28 September 1964 by an American visitor [1, p. 37]. A Bichrome bowl at a UK online gallery, from the collection of Oleg Polunin (1914–1985), bought in the 1950s or 1960s from a licensed Nicosia dealer with a Cyprus Museum lead export tag on the handle, was likewise "verified by the archives kept at the DoA" [1, p. 38]. The collections registered before 1974 were recorded, in Karageorghis's words, with "a card with a description and photograph" [8, pp. 233–234], which is what makes photographs offered online comparable with the archive. The export licences and labels article shows what the tags and papers look like.

Auction archives and image matching. Because sale results are now online, an object's appearances can be traced through successive sales. This works in both directions. Alphas's own example of a stolen piece is a Cypro-Geometric ring-vase from the Hadjiprodromou collection in Famagusta, photographed in Turkey after the invasion, sold at Sotheby's in July 1982 under "Various Properties", sold again in Sotheby's 2014 sale of the collection of the late Stanley J. Seeger, and identified on a London online gallery in July 2016 and repatriated that November [1, p. 37]. The same chain of catalogue entries, read for a lawful piece, carries its history back towards the 1970 line. Reverse image search, by the Department, by museums or by an owner, compares a photograph with images already published, and catches re-offered lots, published museum pieces and catalogue plates.

What the online record cannot show

The online record has three limits. The first is that most lawful exports left no online trace. Objects bought at the Cyprus Museum's sales counter, from licensed dealers, or from the excavators' shares came home in suitcases with a receipt or a tag that families rarely kept, and no catalogue entry, museum number or photograph exists for most of them. An online search that finds nothing has shown nothing about an object's past. The second is that an old catalogue entry is not proof of lawful export. Alphas's survey of Sotheby's catalogues from 1975 to 1999 found most Cypriot lots under "Various Properties" or "The Property of a Lady", and a few of them proved to be stolen [1, p. 35]; a printed sale shows where an object was on a date, not how it left Cyprus. The third is that what the Department publishes is what it objects to. Its announcements describe the objects it asks to have withdrawn; the far larger number it checks and passes, like the Polunin bowl or the 1964 jug, appear only in occasional papers such as Alphas's.

The evidence against this reading

Several parts of the record cut against the view that the online market is mostly old lawful stock coming round again.

• The Department's own count. Of more than 200 Cypriot objects found online in 2015–16, only a few had a credible history, and very few gave any information reaching back to 1970 [1, pp. 34–35]. An undocumented history is the norm online, and the Department's count is not a count of old lawful stock.
• How things came out of the ground. Hardy counts 214 of 319 objects in the Louvre's Cypriot collections formed before 1963, 67 per cent, as "neither scientifically excavated nor found through survey or by accident" [9, p. 466]. Many lawful exports, including much of the 1963–73 material registered under the silent accord, were dug illicitly before they were registered or exported. Lawful export is not lawful excavation.
• The top end. In our own unpublished research on about 3,500 sold Cypriot lots of all dates, about 3 per cent reached $10,000 and under 1 per cent $50,000. Those few pieces, mostly limestone sculpture and rare figures, are worth stealing, and coins and metal-detected finds still pay.
• The state as buyer. The Republic, the Church and foundations bought Cypriot antiquities back on the open market for decades, sometimes through intermediaries; see the state as buyer. Those purchases kept a price on objects that could not otherwise be recovered.
• Real loot online. The Hadjiprodromou ring-vase passed through two major sales before it was found online [1, p. 37]. Some objects with no history are real loot, and some of them sell.

The record answers these points without removing them. The stock of Cypriot material abroad is very large: Fehlmann counted 1,842 Cypriot lots among 52,482 antiquities offered at Christie's and Sotheby's from 1988 to 2008, 377 of them with a history before 1970 [10, p. 161], and the regional and online sales draw on the same estates and old collections at a lower price. Fehlmann writes from Eastern Mediterranean University in occupied Famagusta and states his case polemically, but the counts are his and are given as his. The verified cases in Alphas's paper show the Department's archive confirming lawful papers as readily as it identifies stolen pieces.

What this means for an object on the market today

For a buyer, the internet makes it possible to check a seller's story before bidding: whether a catalogue entry gives a named collection, a sale or an export licence, whether that collection and sale can be found in a digitised catalogue or a museum record, and whether the photograph matches an object already published. A lot with no history at all, at a venue that does not ask for one, is the kind of lot the Department queries. The guide to buying Cypriot antiquities sets out what to ask for.

For an owner or heir, the same records work in the owner's favour. A family receipt, a Cyprus Museum tag, a licence number, or a lot number in a 1920s catalogue can often be checked online or against the Department's archive, and several published cases show the Department confirming such papers. A piece with nothing written down is not thereby suspect in law, and many have honest histories that were simply never recorded; the guide for objects brought home from Cyprus, the guides to selling in the UK and the US, and the page on collecting Cypriot antiquities today explain the options. Declared pieces can be sold in specific circumstances, and an object can also be returned or donated. Whether a particular object can be sold, and where, depends on what can be found about it; contact us with photographs and whatever papers survive, and we will help trace what the online record holds.