I'm very much enjoying the philosophical debate underlying this
thread.
While some feel a coin's
history is compromised by a present-day alteration, others see the coin as a continuous object that maybe only needs
good record keeping. Meanwhile, no one seems to see the modification as a positive point in its
provenance.
There appears to be no doubt that the motivation was greed, and that there was some intent to deceive - yet no one seemed to be concerned as to whether greed itself was a motivator in the cleaning and repair of the
Diva Domna sestertius. This suggests to me that greed is not under ethical scrutiny here, only matters surrounding the alterations themselves.
The other day, I saw a show that was trying to track the
history of a silver ingot that was recovered from Antocha shipwreck. A beautiful piece with only one seemingly tragic scar: an intentional diagonal gash starting from the bottom right hand corner. It was later revealed that this was a mark designating somebody's piece of the action, among other possibilities. The point is, the mark was nothing less than a battle scar - a moment in the ingots long existence, neither necessarily
good nor bad, only historic.
This brought to mind a coin I have which is an 1893 Indian
head penny, impressed, possibly by a train, with the
face of a 1910
Lincoln penny. Whether one deems it defaced or not, it undoubtably marks a specific moment in the coin's long life, though many years after its birth. I see it now as not an end of its virginal
history, rather a
part of a longer
history, one which continues, but does not end with me. That said, I would not imagine modifying the coin myself.
So I ask: are we a
part of a coin's ongoing
history, or curators of its past?
