Diggers

NIGHT-TIME DIGGERS, RUNNERS AND DEALERS

The ancient Greek and, in continuation, the Roman civilizations flourished about two thousand years ago and for nearly as long their feats remain unequalled. It was not until the Renaissance that Europe was finally able to produce thinkers and artefacts equal to those of two millennia before. The written works of great people like Pythagoras, Socrates and Euripides have survived in libraries and in monasteries. Only a few of the works of the ancient artists, however, have been passed down to us. This is hardly surprising. In times of unrest, great art that is publicly displayed is either looted or hidden. Privately owned art is also hidden. During upheavals people die and buildings crumble so most artefacts are entombed. Dust accumulates continuously over the surface of the earth resulting in a continuous rise in ground level. It is a fact that all ancient artefacts are buried and must be excavated if they are to be discovered.

There is a great number of people interested in ancient artefacts, and as a result there are others who are willing to spend the time and effort to find them. Some of these excavations are legal. This type of digging is motivated by curiosity, it is organized primarily by the world’s universities and it is carried out by professors of archaeology, the so-called ‘day-time diggers’. University professors have teaching duties most of the year and normally spend only a couple of months in excavation sites. For the manual work they use their own students or hire local hands. The finds are examined and analyzed. Some are then displayed in museums for everyone to admire.

There are however other excavations. We occasionally learn of them from the crime pages of newspapers. This type of digging is carried out by looters, it is motivated by profit, and it is organized by the laws of supply and demand. These ‘night-time diggers’ operate year round and do manual work personally. The finds are examined and valued. They are then sold to private owners who may admire them in secret.

It is a gross misunderstanding to presume that university professors are the driving force for the discovery of artefacts. They are low paid, part-time, civil servants with a scientific motive to understand history. They have discovered a small fraction of what is known to exist. We glimpse at their actual efficiency every time they discover a tomb. We admire them for its discovery, yet almost invariably, the tomb is empty. Long before them, night-time diggers had discovered the tomb and taken the treasure. It is unfortunate that the world of night-time diggers owes its very existence to secrecy and cannot show us the artefacts they have managed to discover. We would have had far more, and considerably better, museum displays and knowledge of history.

To avoid this enormous loss of heritage, most countries with ancient artefacts have made laws to restrict their trade in the source country. If someone finds an artefact older than a hundred years, he must immediately surrender it to the proper authorities. The penalties for not doing so are severe. But just as liquor restrictions in the United States created the Mafia, artefact restrictions have made illicit dealing highly professional and efficient. A farmer who accidentally discovers artefacts will not likely know a collector who might want to buy them. If he asks other farmers, however, he will learn the name of the local runner. Runners are intermediaries. They buy from the amateur night-time digger, take the artefacts secretly out of the country and sell them to legitimate (if dishonest) dealers in Europe and America. The latter then proceed to sell the artefacts to collectors. From farmer to runner to the dealer outside the source country, the system works flawlessly.

The restriction laws have brought about another distortion. You can’t buy ancient artefacts in the source country. For example, since all ancient Greek coins that are legally in Greece are in museums, and museums cannot sell, there are no genuine coins available for commercial purposes. That’s why if you wanted to buy an ancient Greek coin, the last place you should shop for it would be in Greece, its country of origin. You can of course approach one of the few legitimate dealers who have a permit to legally sell ancient Greek coins to collectors in Greece. The coins these dealers sell, mostly cheap coppers and owls, all have one common characteristic. They are legal imports that sometime before were illegally exported from the source country!

Most tourists don’t know all this. They think that if the fruitful Greek earth is the supply, then surely the Greek coin shops will have ancient coins to sell. The small coin shop owner knows that there is a large demand out there. He can refer his customers to one of the few dealers who can legally cater to collectors, but in this case there is no money to be made. He may become a dealer himself, but this involves foreign contacts and a large investment and he will price himself out of what the average tourist can afford. If he wants to make a profit from his average customer, he has to either plug into the illicit coin pipeline for the cheap coins available or, if he is technically inclined, make the coins himself.

That’s why there are people like Anthony Tsigas.