Today is the deadline for comments. I submitted the following objection last night:
I would like to register my opposition to the renewal of the
Italian MOU regarding
ancient coins, and to any extension of that MOU to apply to additional classes of
Roman coins.
I believe that the Italians are wrong to wish to prohibit the importation of
Roman coins into the
United States. That measure will not reduce illegal digging at
Italian sites, since
Roman coins will continue to find a ready market in European countries and the rest of the world. Since
Roman coins are as a rule extremely common, and circulated throughout the Mediterranean world, it would be perverse to suppose that they somehow “belong” to the
Italian state. Private collectors in
Italy and around the world, and museums and universities in other countries, should be allowed to own them too, as has been the case since collecting first began in the Renaissance.
Roman coins in and of themselves, independently of where they were found, are an important source of
Roman history. Since the ancient historians rarely furnish dates, coins provide the basic chronology for many reigns during the
Roman empire, to name just one of their uses. But the coins must be closely studied to provide that information, and collecting is advantageous to that study. Coins are usually illustrated in catalogues or online when they are sold, and those illustrations can be used by students. The ability to actually acquire coins spurs some collectors to study particular coinages in detail and publish their results. In the past many private
collections have eventually been acquired by museums or universities, where they can be consulted by scholars for their studies, and are often also used in teaching.
I may mention that I myself have been a collector and student of
Roman coinage for over fifty years. My first
collection is now in the British Museum in
London and the Ashmolean Museum in
Oxford; my new
collection, much larger, may end up at
Yale University. I have studied and published articles about the coinages of a number of
Roman emperors, and have many other such studies underway. I have made a number of small but important discoveries, for example that
Septimius Severus’ defeat of
Clodius Albinus near
Lyon took place not on 19 February 197, as everyone
had believed, but rather one year earlier, on 19 February 196. I believe that my collecting and my numismatic research are advantageous to the overall study of
antiquity, and to the
Italian state too, which must have an interest that
Italy’s ancient culture should be widely studied and correctly understood. The extension of the
Italian MOU to further classes of
Roman coins would seriously impede my own collecting of such coins, of course, but also my study of them.
