Christian Wilhelm Huber

Christian Wilhelm Huber, who appears in the sale catalogue as "C. G. Huber", was born in Vienna on 26 February 1804¹. Olivier Masson gives 1803⁶. He entered the administrative service in 1828 and in 1836 became chancellor of the consulate general at Odessa, the year he began his own coin collection. He was consul at Galatz from 1839 and consul general at Alexandria from 28 November 1849, with the rank of consul general first class for Egypt from 11 June 1851. He retired on 22 November 1858. In 1852 the Institut d'Égypte at Alexandria elected him an honorary member, and Joseph Karabacek credits him with costly excavations in the necropolis at Saqqara¹.

His collection of 7,700 Greek and Roman coins, formed in the Levant over twenty-five years, was sold by Sotheby & Wilkinson in London from 4 June 1862 over seven days^1,2. The Cypriot coins are lots 696 to 704. Lot 697 was bronzes of Salamis, and lot 698 an Amathus silver piece with a ram, the crux ansata and Cypriot characters. Lot 699 was a gold piece with the head of Herakles and an ibex. Lot 700 held six small pieces headed by the Idalion obol, with a boar's-head piece attributed to Lyttus but "generally found in the island of Cyprus". Lots 702 to 704 were Cypriot gold of Evagoras I, Nikokles and Pnytagoras². Masson reads the annotated catalogue as naming Eastwood as the buyer of lot 700, with the obol later reaching Leiden through Jan Pieter Six⁶. Babelon and Wroth cited lots 699 and 700 in the 1880s^7,8.

In 1869 Huber founded the Numismatische Zeitschrift in Vienna, publishing it at his own expense, and wrote in its first volume on the Ptolemaic coinage, including tetradrachms of Paphos, Kition and Salamis^1,4. He died on 1 December 1871. Karabacek gave the memorial speech to the Vienna Numismatic Society on 13 January 1872, and Huber's heirs paid for the completion of volume 3 of the journal¹.