They mainly wanted a law that addressed famous old German Masters (Dürer, e.g.). They included coins because the Culture Minister at the time, a Social Democrat, i.e. the coalition's "junior" partner wanted to flex some muscle. So they hired exactly zero experts in numismatics and made the law so vague as to be virtually unenforceable. Germany was a huge crossroads for ancient coins dug up in Greece, Turkey and Bulgaria, and they didn't want to lose out on the taxes of the profits, so they made only symbolic interventions in the market. They had no idea what they were doing, so it wasn't difficult to lay low. An old master painting is a unique item. It's way more difficult to police a coin of which hundreds or thousands were already on the market decades before the finds in Afghanistan. They all look alike, after all. One from a collection from the year 1846 looks exactly like the one sold by the Taliban two years ago, and now being offered on eBay or some home shopping channel.
The antiquities trading laws were designed to curtail smuggled artifacts of rarity, not coins of which hundreds or thousands were already traded in collector circles over the last two centuries. There were hardly any coins founds worth in the thousands, but there WERE many thousands of cheaper ones. They are easier to transport than fragile pottery, impossible to distinguish from legally owned identical coins, and therefore easily traded, and imported/exported without restriction. This actually is the best policy, as sending a culture Gestapo out to police something they can't possibly identify, understand or enforce is stupid, and a wast of resources.
It isn't the black market once these coins are legally imported into Scandinavia. They certainly have no cultural significance to the Scandinavians, or, really, to any other Europeans. Considering the quantities, they don't really have any cultural significance to the Afghans, Indians or Greeks, due to the sheer quantity. These are not rarities that can be considered theft of the country's cultural heritage. Museums there still have thousands of these things hidden from the public laying in their cellars.
Same goes for Greece, Italy and Turkey, for that matter. If the museums there can confiscate coins subject to export restrictions, they will, but they will just disappear into some museum cellar until some corrupt museum official decides he needs some extra cash. The really cool stuff remains on display, but the "duplicates" languish in storage facilities gathering dust. If two thousand of some popular ancient gold coin (say, an Alexander the Great gold stater) are in some musty sack in Thessaloniki or Athens somewhere, and some museum official decides he needs a new house, well if that sack suddenly is 200 coins light, it could be 150 years before anyone notices. Alexander gold staters are popular, but not rare (current market about $2500 wholesale for a decent piece). A hundred or two new pieces showing up, divided between the markets in Germany, England and the USA, wouldn't even raise an eyebrow, and groups of them are still being found.
= new reply since forum marked as read
