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Stories by TimeLine Auctions
Where Do Museums Get Their Antiquities? Ten That the Private Market Saved This Century
In 1812 the Crown Prince of Bavaria, the future Ludwig I, bought seventeen marble figures through an agent at an auction he did not attend. They were the pedimental sculptures from the temple of Aphaia on Aegina, knocked down on the island of Zante for some £6,000, then shipped to Rome for Thorvaldsen to restore. They became the centrepiece of the Munich Glyptothek when it opened to the public in 1830. Two centuries later, in a field in the Chew Valley south of Bristol, seven friends out with metal detectors turned up 2,584 silver pennies struck on either side of the Norman Conquest. In ... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 18th July 2026
Clean Without Soap: Personal Hygiene in the Ancient World
On the shelf of almost any antiquities dealer, and in the glass cases of most museums with a classical collection, there is a row of small bottles. Some are clay, some are coloured glass trailed with zigzags, some are blown glass gone milky and iridescent in the ground. The labels hedge: unguentarium, perfume bottle, balsamarium, sometimes tear-bottle. They are cheap by the standards of the case, easy to walk past on the way to the gold and the marble. They are also the most honest objects in the room, because they are the everyday equipment of how people actually kept clean, and keeping clean... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 17th July 2026
How Two Icons in Munich Became the Canellopoulos Collection
In 1923 a student from Athens, sent to Munich at fifteen to read law, philology and chemistry, bought two early-sixteenth-century icons: a Virgin and a Saint Nicholas. Greek panels of this kind had reached Bavaria with the courtiers of King Otto, the Wittelsbach prince who became the first king of modern Greece, and Paul Canellopoulos recognised these on the Munich market for what they were. He kept buying. By the time he left Bavaria he had forty-five Greek works, most of them sixteenth-century icons, and the first ten, acquired over two years, were the start of everything that followed. Wha... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 16th July 2026
How Thousands of Greek Antiquities Left the Country, Legally
On Lycabettus Street in Athens, a visitor holding a calling card could be admitted, between two and five in the afternoon, to a private museum of antiquities. Murray's Handbook for Travellers in Greece listed it among the city's collections. The owner was Athanasios Rhousopoulos, professor of archaeology at the University of Athens, and the place was, as Yannis Galanakis put it after reconstructing the man's business from his surviving letters, best understood as a dealer's shop. An English traveller named Richard Farrer noted in 1880 that every object in it carried a price, ru... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 15th July 2026
Eleni Stathatos and the Ancient Gold She Gave Away
A Hellenistic gold hairnet of the type the Stathatos collection made famous, this late third to early second century BC example in the J. Paul Getty Museum, the medallion worked with Aphrodite and a small Eros. J. Paul Getty Museum (CC0), via Wikimedia Commons. In a ground-floor gallery of the National Archaeological Museum in Athens stands a dome of gold the size of a small bowl, mounted on a clear stand so that visitors can read the work on every side. At its crown a goddess rises in repoussé from a single disc of sheet gold, her head turned and lifted, a laurel wreath and a ring ... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 14th July 2026
Antiquities Dealers in Egypt & How Antiquities Left the Country, from the First Dealers to the 1983 Export Ban
Into the 1950s, a tourist could finish a circuit of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, step into a room beside the exit, and buy a genuine antiquity to take home. Baedeker's guide for 1895 described the arrangement in a sentence, without alarm: in Room XCI "the visitor may purchase antiques, the authenticity of which is vouched for by the museum-authorities. A permit to export is given with each purchase." The state that guarded ancient Egypt also sold it, over a counter, with the export licence handed across in the same transaction. For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuri... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 13th July 2026
How the Export of Antiquities Built the World's Museums and Private Collections
The British Museum's Egyptian Sculpture Gallery, photographed about 1913, its hall lined with colossal pharaonic statuary acquired through the nineteenth-century trade. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. In 1895 a visitor to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo could buy a mummy and take it home with the state's blessing. Baedeker's handbook gave the directions: inside the museum was a room where "antiques, the authenticity of which is vouched for by the museum-authorities," were for sale, and where "a permit to export is given with each purchase." The room was t... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 12th July 2026
The Gods of the Ancient Near East: Religion from the Neolithic to the Classical Period
In a case in Oxford's Ashmolean Museum sits a human skull packed with plaster, its eye-sockets set with shell, the brow and cheeks modelled back into a face. It came out of the ground at Jericho, and it is roughly nine thousand years old. Kathleen Kenyon, who found a group of them in the early 1950s, called them the earliest portraits. Whoever made this one had buried a relative beneath the floor of the house, waited for the flesh to go, lifted the skull back out, and given it a second face. There is no god anywhere near it. A plastered human skull from Neolithic Jericho (Tell es-Sulta... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 11th July 2026
Why Bronze Survived and Iron Didn't
In 1972 a man snorkelling off the Calabrian coast saw a bronze arm protruding from the sand. It belonged to one of two bronze warriors, the Riace Bronzes, who had spent something close to two thousand years on the seabed. They came up almost sound: silver teeth, copper lips and nipples, the muscles still legible under a thin skin of corrosion. Iron from the same kind of water behaves nothing like this. On many wrecks the iron has gone entirely. Where a sword or a tool once lay, the hard crust around it holds a clean, empty cavity in the exact shape of the thing that dissolved. Marine conservat... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 10th July 2026
Sir William Hamilton and the Birth of the British Collection
David Allan's portrait of Sir William Hamilton, 1775. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. David Allan painted him in 1775 in the scarlet robes of the Order of the Bath. A Greek vase stands on a pedestal at his left; through the window at his right, Vesuvius is smoking. It is an unusually honest portrait, because it shows the three things Sir William Hamilton wished to be remembered for and sets them in one frame: the diplomat, the collector, the student of the volcano. He is remembered for a fourth thing instead, one nobody thought to paint. To most people who know the name at all... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 9th July 2026
An 81-centimetre stick from a Greek coal mine is the oldest known handheld wooden tool
Two worked wooden objects from Marathousa 1 in Greece, dated to around 430,000 years ago, push the record for portable wooden tools back by some 40,000 years. One looks like a digging stick; the other, barely larger than a finger, has no known parallel. Catalog number: 940/673-39 Two pieces of worked wood from a lakebed in southern Greece have been identified as the oldest known handheld wooden tools, made around 430,000 years ago. The larger is an alder stick about 81 centimetres long, shaped by chopping and carving and worn smooth at one end. The smaller is a willow or poplar object just... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 8th July 2026
Slip, Paint, Glaze: How Cultures Coloured Clay and Stone
In the Worcester Art Museum there is a white-ground oil flask, a lekythos, painted in Athens around 450 BC by the hand known as the Achilles Painter. Two women stand at a grave. One still wears the dull red of her dress; the other, facing her, has been stripped to a bare outline and now seems to stand there naked, which no Athenian painter ever intended at a tomb. The clothing was there at the start, brushed on in reds and blues and yellows after the pot came out of the kiln, and over twenty-five centuries that added colour has gone, while the drawing beneath it, fired into the surface, stays ... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 7th July 2026
My father, the enemy ships are already here: The Late Bronze Age Collapse
"My father, the enemy ships are already here." Sometime around 1190 BC the king of Ugarit dictated those words in a reply to the king of Cyprus, who had written to steady his nerve: fortify your towns, bring the troops and chariots inside them, wait for the enemy with firm feet. The advice was sound and useless. "They have set fire to my towns and have done very great damage in the country," the king, Ammurapi, answered. He could do none of it, because his army was stationed in Hatti, hundreds of miles north, and his warships were off the coast of Lycia. "The country i... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 6th July 2026
Nearly Sixty Roman Phallus Carvings Counted Along Hadrian's Wall
Rob Collins, an archaeologist at Newcastle University who manages the Hadrian's Wall Community Archaeology Project, has counted 59 phallic carvings along the Roman frontier that ran across northern Britain, 39 of them cut as incised lines, 19 carved in relief and one a free-standing sculpture. They range from quick scratches in wall stones to deep reliefs at gates, bridges and quarries, and the fort at Vindolanda holds the densest cluster, more than a dozen examples. In Roman belief the phallus, or fascinum, warded off the evil eye and ill luck and guarded the people and places marked with it... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 5th July 2026
Why so many ancient coins survived
A worn Roman silver denarius, close to two thousand years old, can be bought today for less than the cost of dinner out. By most reasonable expectations it should not exist at all. Most ancient coins did not survive. Once an issue went out of use its metal was always worth more than its face value, and the simplest thing to do with old coin was to melt it down for the next one. Numismatists who reconstruct ancient output from the dies that struck it generally assume that only a small fraction of one percent of what was minted is still with us. Whatever escaped the crucible then faced two thou... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 4th July 2026
How Antiquities Left Cyprus: The Mechanics of the Trade and Its Marketplace
A seven-foot limestone statue once left Larnaca wrapped in a sheet, carried down to the boats by sailors who had been told they were handling a dead or drunken man. It belonged to Robert Hamilton Lang, manager of the Imperial Ottoman Bank at Larnaca and sometime British vice-consul. He had bought it near Pyla and sold it to the captain of an Austrian frigate, and the sheet was how it got past the customs guard on the Scala, the port quarter on the Larnaca shore. Another time, Lang's dragoman talked the customs watchman into stepping away while porters loaded the crates. By Lang's own account,... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 3rd July 2026
The Lotus: One Name, Several Plants, Two Symbolic Traditions
When chemists ran petals of the Egyptian blue lotus through a mass spectrometer, hunting the narcotic that newspapers had promised, they came up with kaempferol and quercetin: two ordinary flavonoids, the kind of compound in an onion skin, and not a trace of the alkaloids that would make anyone feel anything at all. One of the samples was an ancient petal, lifted from a first-century AD flower garland at Hawara in the Fayum. The "Egyptian Viagra," the blue lotus as a recreational high, was a media gloss the researchers themselves disowned as oversensational. The alkaloids in the pop... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 2nd July 2026
An 11,000-Year-Old Girl, Identified by DNA, Is Northern Britain's Oldest Known Human
The oldest known human remains from northern Britain belong to a girl who died between the ages of two and a half and three and a half, around 11,000 years ago, according to a study of ancient DNA from a cave in Cumbria. The find sets a securely sexed individual, her age at death fixed to within a year, at the very start of the region's human record, in the centuries after the last Ice Age. The bones came from Heaning Wood Bone Cave, near Great Urswick on the Furness peninsula, where the local archaeologist Martin Stables has excavated since 2016. An international team led by Dr Rick Pe... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 1st July 2026
20 Great Private Antiquities Collections, and What Became of Them
When Sir William Hamilton sold his Greek vases to the British Museum in 1772, for eight thousand guineas, he turned a library with a natural-history cabinet attached into a museum of classical art. The Townley marbles, the Egyptian sculpture and the Parthenon frieze all arrived later, through the door his pots had opened. For three centuries the natural end of a private collection of antiquities was to become a public one. The collections below are proof that the pattern continues, and that it has more than one ending. A private collection is the most personal kind of museum and the least per... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 30th June 2026
At a Sardinian Bronze Age tower, a sealed well and a votive sword point to ritual reuse
A sealed stone well packed with deliberately broken pottery, and a nearby cache holding a 94-centimetre bronze sword, three razor-like blades and a lump of copper, have been re-examined at Nuraghe Barru, a Bronze Age tower in south-central Sardinia. A paper published in May in the open-access journal Open Archaeology pairs analysis of the pottery with chemical testing of the metalwork and concludes that the objects were placed there as part of a structured ritual episode, generations after the tower was first built. The work was led by Silvia Amicone of the University of Tübingen and U... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 29th June 2026
A Symposium Isn't What You Think It Is
Book a symposium today and you get a conference room, a lanyard, and a panel of specialists taking turns at a microphone. The word has been promoted. It began as the name for a drinking party, and specifically for the drinking that came after dinner, once the food had been cleared and the tables carried out. One standard reference, The Classical Tradition, puts it flatly: the modern academic event "has none of the characteristics that marked the Greek practice." Somewhere between an Athenian couch and a hotel ballroom, the wine drained out of the word. Put it back, and something s... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 28th June 2026
Up to 15,000 Roman Coins Recovered from a Field in North Wales
Two metal detectorists, David Moss and Ian Nicholson, have recovered as many as 15,000 Roman silver coins from a field in North Wales, packed into two clay pots and buried about 20 inches below the surface. The hoard weighs more than 60 kilograms and is now at National Museum Cardiff, where staff are cleaning, cataloguing, and identifying the coins. Their assessment is expected in 2026. The find may be the largest Roman coin hoard recorded in Wales. Anthony Halse, chairman of the South Wales and Monmouthshire Numismatic Society, has said it could be the biggest such find in the country. The... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 27th June 2026
Antiquities Dealers in Egypt & How Antiquities Left the Country, from the First Dealers to the 1983 Export Ban
Into the 1950s, a tourist could finish a circuit of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, step into a room beside the exit, and buy a genuine antiquity to take home. Baedeker's guide for 1895 described the arrangement in a sentence, without alarm: in Room XCI "the visitor may purchase antiques, the authenticity of which is vouched for by the museum-authorities. A permit to export is given with each purchase." The state that guarded ancient Egypt also sold it, over a counter, with the export licence handed across in the same transaction. For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuri... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 26th June 2026
The Bright Disc: A History of Ancient Mirrors, from Neolithic Obsidian to Roman Glass
Seven discs of obsidian, ground flat and polished on one face, came out of the Neolithic houses of Çatalhöyük in south-central Anatolia. The largest is about eight centimetres across and nearly four thick, a heavy lens of black volcanic glass with limestone paste still packed around the rim where a hand once held it. Five were finished, two left half-made. They are roughly eight thousand years old, and they are the earliest objects anyone has called a mirror. Whether they are mirrors at all is not settled. James Conolly, who studied the site's obsidian industry, holds that the reflective s... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 25th June 2026
Living Yeasts Found in Ötzi the Iceman, 5,300 Years After His Death
Yeasts that have lived on and inside Ötzi the Iceman for more than 5,300 years are still alive, and at least one of them has kept growing inside the refrigerated cell where the mummy is kept. Researchers at Eurac Research in Bolzano cultured four groups of living, cold-adapted yeast from the body, one of them from deep in his stomach, and reported the results on 3 June in the journal Microbiome. A reconstruction of Ötzi as he may have looked in life, with replica clothing and tools. Photo: Melotzi5713, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The result has a practical edge for the people wh... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 24th June 2026
Italian Teens Snuck Into Their School Basement, and Found a 1,800-Year-Old Roman Mansion
Rooms from a Roman house of the mid-second century AD, their wall paintings and figural stucco surviving up to the vaulted ceilings, have been uncovered beneath the gymnasium of a high school a few minutes' walk from the Colosseum in Rome. The rooms lie under the Liceo Scientifico Cavour. According to LiveScience, students had for years traded stories about hidden chambers, and several came across dark corridors and ancient masonry on unofficial trips into the basement. They reported the find to Claudia Marino, a history and Latin teacher, who passed wo... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 23rd June 2026
Samurai at the Sphinx: The Doomed Diplomacy of the Ikeda Mission
Thirty-six men in full samurai regalia, swords at their hips, standing in the Egyptian sand before the Great Sphinx of Giza. The photograph, taken in 1864 by the Italian-British photographer Antonio Beato, looks at first glance like a clever digital fabrication. It is entirely real. The men were members of the Ikeda Mission, a diplomatic delegation sent by Japan's Tokugawa Shogunate on a journey that would fail in every one of its stated aims, yet leave behind one of the most arresting images of the nineteenth century. A Mission Born from Crisis Ikeda Nagaoki... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 26th May 2026
Two Gods, One Table
On one side of the vessel, a young woman rides a bull toward the sea while a bearded man watches from the shore. On the other, the god of wine stands motionless between a satyr playing a lyre and a woman lost in dance. Two scenes of divine power, painted on opposite faces of the same wine-mixing bowl. The krater is Attic red-figure, dated to the fifth century BC, and stands 44.5 centimetres high. It weighs close to six kilograms: a wide-mouthed column krater with a flared and stepped foot, strap handles opening into columnar legs, and the familiar decorativ... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 25th May 2026
Between Luxor and Abydos: A Painted Stele and Its Three Divine Patrons
His name placed him under the protection of Amun at Luxor; his offering formula asked Osiris at Abydos for bread. Pa-di-Amun-(em)-ipat, "the one whom Amun-in-Opet has given," owned a stele that bound two distant cult centres into a single painted surface, and that surface is what survives. The stele is wooden, arch-topped, 45 centimetres high and just under two kilograms. It is built from two vertical boards, coated with gesso (a smooth white plaster ground) for painting. In the arched top, a winged sun-disc flanked by two pendant uraei spans the full width. Below, the deceased st... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 24th May 2026
First Greek Artefact Found in Berlin: Lost Collectors Item or Archeological Discovery?
A bronze coin minted at Ilion, the Hellenistic city on the site of ancient Troy, has been recovered from a ploughed field in the Berlin district of Spandau. It is the first artefact of Greek antiquity recorded inside the Berlin city area, according to the Landesdenkmalamt Berlin, the state heritage office. The coin, about 12 millimetres across and weighing around seven grams, dates to between 281 and 261 BCE. It was picked up by a 13-year-old schoolboy walking across agricultural land and identified by specialists at the Museum für Vor- und Frühge... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 23rd May 2026
A Bowl for Manishtushu
Manishtushu, king of Akkad from roughly 2270 to 2255 B.C., is best remembered in stone. His obelisk, a four-sided diorite stele, records the royal purchase of more than three thousand hectares of land in northern Babylonia. His own inscriptions claim that he led an expedition across what the Akkadians called the Lower Sea, the Persian Gulf, to Magan in present-day Oman, to secure diorite and metals for his court. "These are no lies," one inscription insists. "It is absolutely true!" A bronze bowl carries his name. Hemispherical, thin-rim... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 22nd May 2026
God or Man: A Kassite Seal and Its Unanswered Question
The seal is banded agate, white stone crossed with brown bands, 42 mm long and 16 mm in diameter. It is large for a Mesopotamian cylinder seal, large enough to carry what its owner required: a single standing figure and, filling the rest of the surface, eight lines of cuneiform. Perforated lengthwise for a cord, it weighs just under 19 grams and remains in very good condition. The figure stands to one side, hemmed in by the text. He wears a wraparound robe that falls from waist to feet but parts at the front, leaving one leg bare. A heavy beard covers the l... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 21st May 2026
Metal Detectorist Unearths Gold Ring Linked to the Saxon God Woden: Now Heading for Public Display
A finely worked gold ring decorated with a garnet and quartz cloisonné bird, likely representing one of the god Woden's raven companions, will go on display at Epping Forest District Museum in Waltham Abbey, Essex, this May. Metal detectorist Dean Young found the ring near Matching Green, Essex, in 2023, and it has since been declared treasure by a coroner, clearing the way for the museum to acquire it with the help of grants from the Arts Council England/V&A Purchase Grant, the Headley Trust, the Art Fund, and several local heritage organisations. The... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 20th May 2026
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Wahibre: Separated in Stone, Reunited at Auction
The figure kneels in dark basalt, forty centimetres high. He has a broad rounded wig set low on the forehead in the Saite manner, his hands held forward at waist height. A column of hieroglyphs runs down the dorsal pillar behind him and identifies him: Count; Overseer of the Entrance to the Hill Countries; Chief Supervisor of the Shrines of Neith; Wahibre, son of Paeftchawy. The work was made under Amasis, in the 26th Dynasty, between roughly 570 and 525 B.C. About the man himself we have only what the inscription says. The most info... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 19th May 2026
Kurigalzu's Stones: Small Inscriptions of a Major Reign
Between roughly 1332 and 1308 BC, Kurigalzu II of Babylon held the Kassite throne through a reign that included a hard-fought campaign against the Assyrians at the Tigris, building work at Nippur and the royal city of Dur-Kurigalzu, and a steady output of small inscribed stones dedicated in the temples of his kingdom. This agate cabochon, 42 mm across with four columns of cuneiform on its reverse, belongs to that output. The disc is an agate eye-bead: a cabochon cut from banded chalcedony where the natural concentric layers, light against dark, produce something that reads unmistakably as a... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 19th May 2026
Deactivated for Burial: A Monumental Bronze Osiris of the 26th Dynasty
Three vertical slots run down each side of the tall crown, and a small hole sits at the top of each fist. The plumes that completed the Atef and the upper portions of the crook and flail are gone. What remains is the body of the figure: mummiform, frontal, arms crossed at the chest, standing some seventy centimetres high on a modern wooden base. The mortices and sockets where the missing parts were fitted are clean and deliberate, cut for assembly rather than worn through use. The bronze is hollow-cast, almost nine kilograms in weigh... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 18th May 2026
The Helmet in the River: A Greek Warrior's Bronze in Southern Spain
In 1938, tangled in the undergrowth on the left bank of the Guadalete River near Jerez de la Frontera, a bronze Corinthian helmet turned up. Manuel Esteve, then director of the Museo Arqueológico Municipal de Jerez, recognised it immediately for what it was: a piece of Greek military equipment, hammered from a single sheet of bronze, that had no obvious business being in southern Spain. He acquired it for the municipal collection, where it remains today, one of only three Corinthian helmets ever recovered from the Iberian Peninsula. Esteve initially dated the ... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 18th May 2026
What Remains of an Official
The arms are gone at the shoulder and the right leg below the knee, with neither loss being accidental. The figure is made of wood, 55.7 cm high, and stands now from head to mid-thigh, with the front of a kilt and the upper portion of an advancing left leg preserved. Where the arms ended, the surfaces are abruptly cut, the same is true of the right leg. These elements were likely never part of the same piece of timber. Old Kingdom sculptors, working with the short, often knotty native woods available to them, assembled large figures by joining separately carved limbs to a central block with do... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 17th May 2026
A Pyxis with a Chariot
The pyxis is 22.5 cm across and weighs just over a kilo, the lid raised on a small knop, the sidewall carrying a single continuous frieze. A four-horse chariot moves to the right. Attendants in chitons and himatia walk alongside, spears held upright. Among them is a woman in a long robe, the only figure whose dress is set apart from the rest. The shape is the squat Attic pyxis of the 6th century B.C.: a flared sidewall with carination at top and bottom, a rounded foot, a broad watchglass lid set with a central acorn-shaped knop. The decoration is black-figu... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 15th May 2026
Why Prehistoric People Built Nearly 1,000 Burial Mounds on a Single Mountain Range
Close to a thousand prehistoric burial mounds dot the mountains along the Portuguese-Galician border, clustered across ridgelines and high plateaux that have served as landmarks for at least seven thousand years. A team of researchers from the University of Santiago de Compostela, the University of Coimbra, and ERA Arqueologia has now mapped 178 of these monuments in high resolution, using airborne laser scanning (LiDAR) and statistical modelling to answer a deceptively simple question: why here? Their answer, published this month in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, is that t... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 14th May 2026
The Boy King's Last Secret: How Howard Carter Found the Only Intact Royal Burial in Egypt
On the morning of November 4th, 1922, an unusual silence fell over the worksite. Howard Carter, walking towards his crew in the Valley of the Kings, knew at once that something had changed. The men had stopped singing. In sixteen years of digging through Egyptian rubble, Carter had learned to read that particular quiet. It meant they had found something. Beneath the very first workman's hut they had dismantled that morning, cut into the bedrock thirteen feet below the entrance to the tomb of Rameses VI, was a step carved in the rock. Six Seasons of Dust To ... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 12th May 2026
CT Scans Reveal the Secrets of a Forgotten Egyptian Child Mummy in Poland
For more than a century, the small mummy of an Egyptian boy has lain in a church museum in Wrocław, Poland, without ever being formally studied. That changed in 2023, when a team from the Mummy Research Center and Wrocław University placed him inside a hospital CT scanner for the first time, producing thousands of detailed cross-sectional images that allowed them to reconstruct his age, sex, and the methods used to prepare his body for the afterlife. Their findings, published this February in Digital Applications in Archaeology and Cultural Heritage, tell the story of an eight-... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 11th May 2026
A Seal's Tooth, Strung on a Cord: Britain's Rarest Ice Age Pendant Gets a New Identity
For more than 150 years, a small perforated tooth sat in the collections of London's Natural History Museum, labelled first as a badger canine, then as a wolf incisor. Neither identification was correct. A new study published this month in Quaternary Science Reviews reveals that the tooth belongs to a grey seal, making it Britain's only known Upper Palaeolithic seal tooth pendant, and one of just a handful found anywhere in Europe. The pendant was unearthed on 4 February 1867 by William Pengelly, the Victorian naturalist whose meticulous cave excavations at K... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 10th May 2026
A Short History: The Etruscans
Etruscan Funerary Figure Hands. TimeLine Auctions, 24th May 2022, Lot 72, £6,240 The Tyrrhenian Sea still carries their name. So does Tuscany. Yet when we speak of ancient Italy, Rome dominates the conversation, as if the peninsula had been waiting, empty and quiet, for Romulus to draw his furrow in the earth. The truth is rather different. For centuries before Rome became anything more than a cluster of hilltop villages, the Etruscans commanded a civilization that stretched across much of what we now call Italy. At their height, they controlled more territory than Rome would hold unti... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 9th May 2026
Iliad Fragment Recovered with Roman-Era Mummy at Oxyrhynchus
A papyrus preserving part of Book II of Homer's Iliad has been recovered alongside a Roman-period mummy at the Egyptian site of Oxyrhynchus, where a joint Egyptian-Spanish team has been excavating a funerary complex in the Minya Governorate. The fragment contains a section of the "Catalogue of Ships," the long enumeration of the Greek contingents that sailed against Troy. The Catalogue has been closely studied by classicists for its geographic content and for the textual variants preserved across surviving manuscripts and papyri. The find was ... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 8th May 2026
A Second Medieval Sword Surfaces Off Israel's Coast, and the Same Diver Found Both
Image Credit: Yoav Bornstein / University of Haifa The three-foot blade, encrusted in centuries of marine growth, was spotted jutting from the seabed near Dor Beach, not far from where Shlomi Katzin recovered a similar weapon in 2021. A one-metre sword has been pulled from the Mediterranean seabed off the coast of Israel, the second such find in the same stretch of water in just four years. Shlomi Katzin, an underwater archaeologist and student at the University of Haifa's Department of Maritime Civilizations, spotted the weapon protruding from the sand while swimming near Dor Beach on Isr... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 4th May 2026
The Bow Arrived Late, Spread Fast, and Changed Everything (Almost Everywhere)
Around 1,400 years ago, hunters across an enormous stretch of western North America picked up the bow and arrow for the first time. Within a few generations, across the deserts and canyons from northern Mexico to California and the American Southwest, the older weapon system (the atlatl, a hand-held spear-throwing lever) had all but vanished. Further north, in the glacial highlands of the Yukon and Alaska, the story played out differently: hunters kept both weapons in their kit for another thousand years. That dual picture comes from a new study published in PNAS Nex... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 3rd May 2026
The Oldest Confirmed Dogs Lived 16,000 Years Ago, and They Were Already Everywhere
A jawbone from a cave in Somerset and a handful of tiny bones from a rock shelter in central Türkiye have just rewritten the timeline of humanity's oldest partnership. According to a study published this month in Nature, DNA extracted from animal remains at Gough's Cave in the UK (approximately 14,300 years old) and Pınarbaşı in Türkiye (approximately 15,800 years old) confirm that both animals were domestic dogs, not wolves. These are now the earliest genetically verified dogs on record, pushing the definitive evidence for domestication back by roughly 5,000... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 2nd May 2026
Bronzes from the Gravona: A Corsican Hoard from the Turn of the First Millennium BC
Sometime between 1880 and 1890, workmen digging footings for the railway bridge that would carry the Ajaccio–Bastia line across the Gravona river uncovered a cluster of bronzes. The exact spot was not recorded, but the two candidates are Carbuccia, twenty kilometres north-east of Ajaccio, or Bocognano, ten kilometres further up the valley where the line again crosses the river. Both sit deep in the mountainous interior of Corsica, well away from the coast. The objects passed to a local official, Monsieur Ducasse, and from there by descent to his son Jean Dimitri Ducasse, su... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 28h April 2026
The Swimming Pool and 1,500 Antiquities: Inside the Ricard Collection
In a photograph from 1975, French entrepreneur Georges Ricard stands beside Princess Grace and Prince Rainier of Monaco. He is wearing white bell-bottoms. The occasion is the opening of his museum, the Musée de l'Égypte et le Monde Antique, Collection Sanousrit, and everything about the image radiates the particular confidence of a man who has just realized a lifelong ambition. Ricard had spent years acquiring Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Near Eastern antiquities from small French auction houses and dealers. His goal was never to hoard. He wanted to share his passion for the ancient wo... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 27th April 2026
When Goddesses Crossed the Aegean: The Lost World of Bronze Age Brides
Sometime around 1400 BC, a princess from northwestern Anatolia may have boarded a ship bound for the shores of Mycenaean Greece. She carried with her more than a dowry of islands disputed between empires. She brought gods. We know this because fragments of her existence survive in the clay tablets of Hattusa, the Hittite capital, and in the Linear B records scratched into the accounting ledgers of Pylos. When scholars puzzle over a curious phrase in those Pylian tablets, po-ti-ni-ja a-si-wi-ja, they are reading across three thousand years the religious footprint of a vanished Anatolian king... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 24th April 2026
Desmond Morris, zoologist and collector of ancient Cypriot art, dies at 98
Desmond Morris, the Oxford zoologist, broadcaster and surrealist painter best known for The Naked Ape, died on 19 April 2026 at his home in County Kildare, Ireland. He was 98. For antiquities collectors and dealers, Morris was also the builder of a collection of more than 1,100 objects from ancient Cyprus, formed between 1967 and the mid-1970s and published in 1985 as The Art of Ancient Cyprus. Morris described it in that volume as the largest private holding of Cypriot material outside the island. Francesca Hickin, then Head of Antiquities at Bonhams, call... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 21st April 2026
When Mice Ruled Egypt: The Secret Art of the Tomb Builders
When Mice Ruled Egypt: The Secret Art of the Tomb Builders A cat, naked and servile, pours wine into a cup. A mouse, dressed in fine pleated linen, lounges on a chair with its feet resting on a footrest, accepting the drink with regal indifference. This scene, sketched in red and black ink on a palm-sized flake of limestone, was created sometime around 1200 BCE in a small village perched above the western bank of the Nile. The artist was one of the most skilled craftsmen in the ancient world, a man who spent his daylight hours decorating the tombs of pharaohs in the Valley of the Kings. By ... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 18th April 2026
Your First £10,000: Three Approaches to Starting a Collection
Buying your first ancient coin, your first piece of Roman glass, or your first Egyptian amulet can feel overwhelming. You've done the reading, you've browsed online galleries, and you've probably watched a few auction lots close at prices that made you wince. But here's the thing: you don't need to spend decades or drain your savings to build something meaningful. With £10,000, and a clear sense of what you're actually trying to achieve, you can put together the foundation of a collection that will give you genuine satisfaction for years to come. We've seen... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 17th April 2026
The Gods of War: How Divination Shaped History in Assyria and Greece
Corinthian Helmet of a Greek Hoplite. TimeLine Auctions, 25th February 2020, Lot 442, £100,000. The Liver in the Lamplight Somewhere in the Syrian desert, around 1775 BC, a man named Asqudum crouches over a freshly slaughtered sheep. The army of Zimri-Lim, king of Mari, waits in the darkness behind him. No torches burn; the ritual requires secrecy. Asqudum's fingers, slick with blood, probe the animal's liver, searching for the marks that Shamash, the sun god, has inscribed there during the night. The king's question hangs i... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 16th April 2026
A Short History: Ancient Rome
In the year 63 BC, the city of Rome was a powder keg. A bankrupt aristocrat named Lucius Sergius Catilina was plotting to burn the capital to the ground and cancel all debts, capitalizing on the misery of the poor and the frustration of the elite. Facing him in the Senate was Marcus Tullius Cicero, a "new man" from the country who had risen to the highest office of consul through the sheer power of his oratory. We can still read the blistering speeches Cicero delivered, words that pinned Catiline to the wall and eventually drove him out of the city t... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 15th April 2026
The Faith Along the Nile: Christianity's Hidden Egyptian Origins
Byzantine Marble Altar Screen. TimeLine Auctions, 25th May 2021, Lot 129, £3,810 Sometime around 125 CE, a scribe in Middle Egypt bent over a sheet of papyrus. The dry desert air crackled around him. He copied, in careful Greek letters, passages from the Gospel of John: the interrogation of Jesus before Pilate, the question of truth that hangs in the air between them. When he finished, he set the manuscript aside. It would not be read again for eighteen centuries. That small fragment, now known as Papyrus Rylands Greek 457, measures bar... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 20th March 2026
Pre-Roman Britain: What Metaldetectorists Found and Why It Changes Everything
Late in 2021, a metal detectorist sweeping muddy fields in northern England got a signal. He could have grabbed a shovel and started digging. Instead, he picked up the phone and called Tom Moore, an archaeologist at Durham University who had spent years studying the local landscape. That call led to one of the most significant Iron Age discoveries ever made on British soil. Moore and his team eventually extracted more than 900 objects from a ditch near the village of Melsonby in Yorkshire: horse harness fittings, iron wheel rims, spearheads, fragments of ch... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 19th March 2026
Did Gilgamesh Get Depressed?
The History of Feelings in Egypt and Mesopotamia Gilgamesh tore at his hair and roamed the wilderness. He had watched his closest companion, Enkidu, waste away over twelve terrible days, and now the king of Uruk could not stop weeping. He refused to let anyone bury the body. "My friend whom I love has turned to clay," he wailed. "Shall I not also lie down like him, never to rise again?" This is grief in cuneiform, pressed into clay tablets over four thousand years ago, and when we read it today, it feels startlingly familiar. For deca... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 17th March 2026
The Weight of Clay: Lives, Letters, and Legacies from the Ancient Near East
When Nanni Lost His Patience Around 1750 BCE, in a cramped house in the city of Ur, a man named Nanni pressed his reed stylus into damp clay with barely concealed fury. The wedge-shaped marks he made were hurried, emphatic. His letter would travel across the city to a merchant named Ea-nasir, and it was not friendly. "Who am I that you are treating me in this manner," Nanni wrote, "treating me with such contempt? I have written to you to receive my money, but you have neglected to return it." Nanni was not alone in his frustration.... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 16th March 2026
The Grand Tour: Standing Before the Colosseum, Coin Purse in Hand
Picture yourself in Rome, 1765. The morning fog lifts off the Tiber as you stand before the Colosseum's arches, your Grand Tour guide negotiating with a local dealer over a bronze figurine just excavated from the Forum. You finger the coins in your purse, calculating whether you can afford both the bronze and passage back to Dover. This scene, repeated thousands of times across three centuries, created the antiquities market as we know it today. When we examine the Roman intaglio rings or marble busts in our cataloguing room, we handle many ob... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 13th March 2026
Ancient Gods: The Gods & Heroes of Ancient Greece
The Smoke Rising from the Altar A man stands before a marble altar in the grey light before dawn, his hands wet with barley grains and water. Behind him, other worshippers wait in silence. The sacrifice today is a young goat, its throat to be cut so that the blood runs down the stone grooves carved for exactly this purpose. The smell of burning thigh-bones wrapped in fat will soon rise into the air, carrying prayers upward to the gods on Mount Olympus. This is not metaphor. The Greeks believed the gods literally consumed the smoke of sacrifices, that the sweet savour of roasting meat please... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 8th March 2026
The Smoke of the Mede
When the smoke finally cleared from the Acropolis in 479 BC, the Athenians returned to a city of ash. The Persian King Xerxes had burned the temples and leveled the houses, leaving behind a scarred landscape that would define the psychology of a generation. It is here, in the dust of the Persian retreat, that the story of Classical Greece truly begins. We often think of this era as a procession of white marble statues and calm philosophers, yet the reality was far more volatile. It was a period defined by a frantic energy to rebuild, a desperate thirst for security, and a radical... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 6th March 2026
Bitten, Broken, and Looked After: Prehistoric Evidence of Community Care
A young man buried in eastern Bulgaria roughly 6,000 years ago carries an unusual set of injuries: puncture wounds on his skull that match, almost exactly, the teeth of a lion. More striking still, the wounds had healed. He survived the attack. The skeleton, excavated from Grave #59 at the Kozareva mound necropolis near Kableshkovo in Bulgaria's Burgas province, presents what researchers from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences believe is direct osteological evidence of a prehistoric lion encounter. Their analysis, published this month in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, re... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 5th March 2026
A 19-Year-Old Intern Found a Corroded Silver Lump. Nine Months Later, Experts Were Lost for Words
Nico Calman was sifting through soil at an archaeological dig in Haltern am See, a small town in Germany's North Rhine-Westphalia region. He was 19 years old, an intern with the Westphalie Department for the Preservation and Care of Field Monuments, and he had just uncovered what appeared to be a shapeless mass of corroded silver fused to a block of rusted iron. Nobody on site realised what they were looking at. Not yet. A Site Archaeologists Thought They Knew The excavation was taking place at one of the most thoroughly studied Roman military sites in Germany. Archaeologists had ... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 4th March 2026
Building a Collection on a Budget: Undervalued Categories Right Now
A Practical Guide for New Collectors Buying your first ancient artefact can feel like stepping into a room where everyone else already knows the rules. You've browsed the catalogues, admired the bronzes, perhaps even watched the final hammer prices climb beyond what you'd budgeted for a modest start. It's easy to assume that meaningful collecting requires deep pockets or years of expertise. It doesn't. What it requires is knowing where to look, and right now, some of the most historically rich and visually striking categories remain surprisingly affordable. At TimeLine, w... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 3rd March 2026
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Bronze Disease: The Disease That Isn't a Disease
A powdery green eruption appears on the surface of your ancient bronze. Then another. Flakes begin to fall from the object, dusting the display case beneath. Left unchecked, this corrosion can reduce a seemingly solid artefact to a crumbling heap of mineral powder. Collectors and curators have feared this phenomenon for over a century, calling it "bronze disease" despite its having nothing whatsoever to do with bacteria or infection. What Bronze Disease Actually Is The term originates from nineteenth-century speculation. In 1893, rese... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 2nd March 2026
The Boy is Beautiful: Love, Rules, and the Evidence of Greek Vases
Ho pais kalos. The words appear scratched into the curved surface of a wine cup, following the outline of two figures reaching toward one another. Translated, they mean simply: "the boy is beautiful." This phrase, or variations of it, appears on approximately twenty percent of all surviving Greek vases. Twenty percent. Consider what that means: of the thousands of painted vessels that have come down to us across two and a half millennia, one in five carries this inscription, often with no apparent connection to the scene depicted. The Greeks were not subtle about what o... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 1st March 2026
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Master of the Lion: The God Who Came Before Hercules
Phoenician Limestone Herakles Melqart Wearing Lionskin. TimeLine Auctions, 5th March 2024, Lot 88, £845. Somewhere in southwestern Cyprus, perhaps in a workshop near the quarries that supplied Kition or Idalion, a sculptor worked a block of pale limestone into the shape of a god. The stone was soft, almost cheese-like when freshly cut, yielding easily to iron chisels. He carved the figure to be seen only from the front; the back remained flat, unworked, because this was a votive offering destined to stand against the wall of a shrine. He shaped a sh... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 28th February 2026
How a circus strongman opened Egypt to the world
On a summer evening in 1803, the audience at Sadler's Wells Theatre fell silent as a giant stepped onto the stage. Giovanni Battista Belzoni stood nearly six feet seven inches tall, wrapped in the costume of a Samson, his frame engineered by years of physical labour. He hoisted an iron frame onto his shoulders. Eleven men climbed onto it. He walked. For a decade, this was Belzoni's life: the provincial fairs of England, the cramped theatres of Scotland and Ireland, the annual spectacle of Bartholomew Fair where crowds paid pennies to watch him bend iron bars and carry pyramids of bo... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 27th February 2026
Painted Narratives on Ancient Greek and Apulian Clay
Upcoming auction (TimeLine Auctions, starting 3rd March 2026), Lot 71, Estimate £30,000 - £40,000. Two warriors lock in mortal combat across the curved surface of an Attic black-figure alabastron (Lot 0071), their contrasting identities rendered in stark silhouette. The Greek hoplite advances behind a large round shield, his crested Corinthian helmet firmly in place, while his opponent, a Scythian archer, draws back in a patterned tunic and pointed cap. Painted between 500 and 480 B.C., this vessel captures the anxieties and visual vocabulary ... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 26th February 2026
She Carried a Toddler Nearly a Mile Through Mammoth Territory and Left Her Footprints Behind
A single set of bare feet pressed into wet sand more than 10,000 years ago, each step carrying a small child northward through what is now White Sands National Park, New Mexico. The traveler moved quickly, around 3.8 miles per hour, slipping occasionally on the muddy surface as rain fell. Hours later, the same person returned south along the identical route, this time without the child. That journey, captured in more than 400 fossilized footprints spanning nearly a mile, represents the longest human trackway of its age ever documented. A new study published in Quater... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 25th February 2026
Understanding What Makes an Antiquity Truly Important
You're browsing an auction catalogue, and two Roman oil lamps catch your attention. They're from the same period, roughly the same size, and the estimates are within £50 of each other. One sells for £180. The other fetches £2,400. What happened? This scenario plays out in our salerooms constantly, and it confuses new collectors more than almost anything else. The difference between those two lamps isn't random, and it certainly isn't about one bidder simply having deeper pockets. The expensive lamp possessed something the other lacked: importance. That word... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 24th February 2026
Ancient Gods: The Gods of Ancient Egypt
When the Dead Required Attention A priest stands in the half-darkness before dawn, the air still cool and carrying the green scent of the Nile. In his hands he holds a small vessel of natron water. Beyond the cedar doors of the innermost sanctuary, in a shrine of gilded acacia wood no larger than a modern wardrobe, waits the god. The statue is perhaps eighteen inches tall, carved from hard black diorite and finished with eyes of obsidian and lapis lazuli. The priest does not see a statue. He sees the living body of a deity who has condescended to dwell, tem... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 23rd February 2026
Provenance: The General, The Spy, and Thirty Thousand Objects
How Augustus Pitt Rivers Built Two Museums, and How a Suspected Nazi Spy Sold One In the spring of 1880, a 53-year-old army officer named Augustus Henry Lane Fox received news that would transform his life. His cousin, Horace Pitt-Rivers, 6th Baron Rivers, had died, and Lane Fox had inherited more than 32,000 acres of prime English countryside in Cranborne Chase, along with a substantial fortune derived from the wealth of 18th-century paymaster Richard Rigby. With this inheritance came a condition: he must adopt the surname Pitt Rivers. The newly christened Lieutenant-General Augustus Pit... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 19th February 2026
How to Display Antiquities on a Budget
Your first piece arrives. You unwrap it carefully, admire it for a few moments, and then realise you have absolutely no idea where to put it. The dining table seems wrong. The bookshelf feels precarious. The mantelpiece is too dusty. We see this moment of hesitation with nearly every new collector who walks through our doors at TimeLine, and it's one of the most underrated barriers to building a collection. The assumption is that displaying antiquities properly requires custom cabinetry, museum-grade lighting rigs, and a conservator on retainer. It doesn't. What it does require is a... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 19th February 2026
The Workshop and the Stone: Roman Marble Sculpture
The life-size head of Hermes (Lot 0131) is a Roman copy of a fifth-century B.C. Greek type, the Hermes Propylaios attributed to the sculptor Alkamenes, and it repays close looking. The beard is tiered and loosely curled, each wave of distinct from the next. The front of the head is worked with care and clarity; the sides and rear show a more economical finish. This is characteristic of Roman workshop method. Where Greek sculptors typically worked a block from all sides at a roughly even rate, Roman carvers drew their design onto the stone's front face and carved inward, from front to back.... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 18th February 2026
The Art of Finding Bargains: Hunting for Undervalued Antiquities
A word before we begin: This article assumes you've already developed a basic familiarity with the antiquities market. If you're entirely new to collecting, we'd recommend starting with our introductory series for new collectors, which covers the fundamentals of authentication, provenance, and building your first pieces. What follows requires you to have spent some time looking at objects, comparing prices, and developing an eye for what interests you. If you've done that groundwork, read on. Why "Bargain Hunting" Isn't for Everyone Let's be direct: we don't always recommend barg... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 12th February 2026
A Roman Sarcophagus Spent Years as a Beach Bar Table Before Anyone Noticed
A 1,700-year-old Roman sarcophagus sat in full view of sunbathers and cocktail-sippers at a Black Sea beach club near Varna, Bulgaria, serving as an improvised bar table. For how long, no one is quite sure. The ornate stone coffin, decorated with carved garlands, animal heads, and rosettes, went unrecognised until a former police officer on holiday spotted it and alerted local authorities. Archaeologists from the Regional History Museum in Varna subsequently examined the artefact and identified it as a "garland sarcophagus," a distinctly Roman funerary type characterised by ... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 11th February 2026
The Collector's Guide to Ancient Oil Lamps: From Phoenician Saucers to Byzantine Bronzes
Introduction: The Most Accessible Antiquity You've Never Considered Most people walk past ancient oil lamps in museum cases without a second glance. They gravitate toward the marble sculpture, the painted pottery, the glittering gold. That's a mistake, and it's one we see corrected almost every season at TimeLine when a new collector discovers what experienced hands have known for decades: oil lamps are among the most historically rich, typologically diverse, and affordable antiquities available on the market today. Here's the practical reality. A Roman bronze figurine of... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 4th February 2026
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Reading Roman Gemstones
A Roman citizen did not sign documents with a pen. He pressed his ring into warm wax or clay, leaving behind an image chosen to represent him: a god he worshipped, a hero he admired, a scene that spoke to his profession or philosophy. The gem set into that ring was his signature. It authenticated contracts, sealed correspondence, and marked property. But it was also something more personal. In a world without photography, without business cards, the imagery a person chose for their seal was a deliberate act of self-presentation. Our upcoming auction includes an important group of Roman gems... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 4th February 2026
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Sir Francis Drake’s Armada Ring: A Jewel of English History
This article follows on from the feature published in the Daily Mail in August 2017, highlighting one of the most significant items ever sold at Timeline Auctions—a ring believed to have been awarded to Sir Francis Drake by Queen Elizabeth I for his role in defeating the Spanish Armada. A Gift from the Queen The ring, referred to as the “Old rub ring,” is thought to have been commissioned by Elizabeth I following the English Navy’s victory over the Spanish Armada in 1588. Bestowed upon Sir Francis Drake, one of England’s greatest seafarers and heroes, the jewe... Read moreTimeline Auctions
The twisting tale of “Joan of Arc’s ring”
A modest, 15th century silver ring for which an ambitious London dealer might ask £1,000, sold for an astonishing £297,000 at TimeLine Auctions on February 25th, a world auction record for a medieval European ring. There could not be a better example of the degree to which a stellar provenance affects the market value of an object: it was suggested , with the aid of documents sold with the ring, that the original owner of Lot 1220 was Joan of Arc, who led the French army against English invaders, a martyr and patron saint of France. The high bidder was Puy du Fou, a history them... Read moreAuthor, P. W.
Joan of Arc ring returns to France after auction sale
Made in about 1400, the silver gilt devotional ring bears the inscription 'IHS and 'MAR' for Jesus and Mary. It matches the description Joan gave at her trial of the ring given to her by her parents and its connection to Joan has been documented for more than a century. The ring was offered for sale by the son of James Hasson, a French doctor who came to the UK with General de Gaulle in World War Two, Timeline Auctions said. The doctor himself had bought the ring at auction in 1947 for £175. The auctioneer initially estimated its value at between £10,000 and &p... Read moreAuthor of the article, Christopher Klein
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Auctioneers' call to arms
This heavily ornamented iron age Celtic armring, left, took top honours in Timeline Auctions' (24% buyer's premium including VAT) May 24 sale in London back in 2016. A memorable sale and a remarkable item. Made 2500 years ago, it has survived in remarkably good condition with two well-defined adorsed heads separated by a conical band, with high cheek bones, protruding chins and almond shaped eyes. A pair of stylised palmettes, presumably lifted from a 2nd or 3rd century BC Greek building, gave an unusual touch to this Celtic object. Last on the market in 2000 and estimated at ... Read moreAuthor, Antiques Trade Gazette
A County Of Cabinet Quality Coins ... And One Of Them Is In Our Upcoming Auction!
Despite its geographical size as England’s second largest inland county, Shropshire has a sparse and mostly rural population, with fewer than one person per hectare, compared to four per hectare throughout the rest of the country. It has, nevertheless, an impressive record when we look at metal detectorists’ finds reported under the Portable Antiquities Scheme. They include 123 silver discoveries, and 38 gold – one of which comes under the hammer in our September 2025 auction: a Valentinian I solidus, struck at Treveri mint in AD 367-375. Its obverse has Valentinian&rsq... Read moreBrett Hammond, TimeLine Auctions, 7th August 2025
Rooting Out Snakes And Fakes
Mithridates VI, ruler of the Kingdom of Pontus in northern Anatolia from 120 to 63 BC, dominated Asia Minor and the Black Sea region, and attempted to break Roman rule in Asia and the Hellenic world. Fearing death at the hands of food poisoners believed to have murdered other members of his family, Mithridates built-up an immunity to venoms by regularly ingesting sub-lethal amounts of the most dangerous toxins. This practice, now known as mithridatism, is named after him. Mithridates also concocted theriaca, a syrupy liquid made from numerous ingredients, including the flesh of reptiles. Va... Read moreBrett Hammond, TimeLine Auctions, 5th August 2025
Why Collect Ancient Art?
Collecting ancient art is a deeply enjoyable and meaningful pastime. It brings together a love for history, beauty, and the chance to connect with the past. People have always been fascinated by the art and objects of earlier civilisations. Today, collectors continue this tradition, helping to keep history alive and well understood. There are many different types of ancient art to collect - Roman coins, Greek pottery, Egyptian amulets, Near Eastern figures, Islamic ceramics, and more. Each piece has its own story as these were objects used, worn, or displayed by real people in ancient histo... Read moreAaron Hammond, TimeLine Auctions, 22 July 2025
A Timely Salute to TimeLine’s Tried and Trusted Team: The Vetting Committee
Regular readers of our STORIES features will no doubt recollect our January 2024 issue with its revealing account of the efforts made by Committee members as they successfully winnow fakes, forgeries and items of doubtful provenance in the gruelling nine-stage elimination process that ensures none but genuine lots go to our auction room to come under the fall of a TimeLine auctioneer’s gavel. More than a year has passed since publication of that memorable feature, for which we continue to receive grateful thanks from readers who appreciate its clear expatiation of the behind... Read moreBrett Hammond, TimeLine Auctions, 1st July 2025
A Penny For the Thoughts Of Three Who Opposed Public Executions
If twenty-one-year-old housebreaker John Tompson hoped to achieve immortality when he carved a crude hand-engraved message into the surface of a smoothed 1799 copper Cartwheel Penny, he can rest in peace. Almost two hundred years after he created his own memento and epitaph, it turned up as a lot in a well-publicized 2018 TimeLine Auction where the worn penny sold for £600 inc. bp. The words engraved on its surface by the young man as he awaited execution read: CAST FOR DEATH, together with his name, age, and the year of his conviction (1826).The phrase, shortened so that he cou... Read moreBrett Hammond, TimeLine Auctions, 5th June 2025
Three Initially Named As Queens ... And Now One Of Them Features As A TimeLine Auctions Lot
King Henry the Eighth and his six queens have inspired artists, poets, playwrights, novelists, screenwriters, biographers, historians; and the general public around the world, for more than four hundred years. Whether we delve into the academic works of authorities such as Professor Tracy Borman for our in-depth study; or use asimple mnemonic to help us remember his wife’s names (Arrogant Boys Seem Clever; Howard in Particular, for example, to remind us of Aragon, Boleyn, Seymour, Cleves, Howard, and Parr) we express fascination with the complexities of their relationships. Many... Read morePeriklis Mastrangelis, TimeLine Auctions, 28th May 2025
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Was This Rare Coin Another Civil War Siege Souvenir?
English Civil War emergency siege money comes to market very rarely. That’s why TimeLine Auctions staff smiled broadly when one of our earliest sales (December 2010) included a rare Scarbrough Castle five shillings silver piece that sold for £7,590. We told its fascinating story, with details of the bloody fighting that took place before Scarbrough Castle surrendered, in our STORIES column published in September 2023 under the headline: A Pocket Souvenir … From An English Civil War Castle Under Siege. It soon joined the most popular features in our archive. We thought ... Read moreBrett Hammond, TimeLine Auctions, 10th November 2024
TimeLine’s Hands-On Experts Authenticate a pair of Hands-Off Chinese Footballers
Twenty-two countries across Europe – reaching from Latvia to Turkey; and from Portugal to Ukraine - will have watched thirty-two of their country’s teams play in football’s Europa League during 2024-2025. The Europa Championship competition will also have glued citizens to their TV screens in sixteen countries - from Spain to Scotland - from which thirty-six teams will have qualified to participate. What the team players and their vociferous supporters - on the terraces at the matches, and on settees back home – will yell in unison, and most frequently, at the haras... Read moreAaron Hammond, TimeLine Auctions, 9th November 2024
A Pocket Souvenir … From An English Civil War Castle Under Siege.
Talk to anyone who owned a metal detector before 1997 and you will probably hear an account of an unidentified discovery gathering dust in a drawer, or a shoe-box, until the opportunity comes along to ask an expert. That’s what happened during one of TimeLine Auction’s early sales held at The Swedenborg Hall, London in September 2010. A detectorist brought one of his finds to our consignment receiving desk and asked for an opinion on it, and its suitability for inclusion in a future TimeLine Auction. About the size and thickness of an English late-medieval silver crown coin, its... Read moreBrett Hammond, TimeLine Auctions, 9th September 2023
Voting For Collectors
TimeLine Auctions supports the rights of private citizens to own and collect historical artefacts. Indeed, our very existence depends on individuals exercising that right by bidding on, and buying, the thoroughly vetted lots we list in our catalogues. At TimeLine we believe – as our bidders believe - that a fundamental democratic right is upheld every time an auction hammer falls. In countries ruled by authoritarian dictators the sound is rarely, if ever, heard. At a time when elections and voting procedures in the world’s democracies; and the lack of them in undemocratic regions; ... Read moreBrett Hammond, TimeLine Auctions, 21st June 2024
Emotional Moments In The History Of A Medieval Gold Ring
TimeLine Auctions vetting team must have shared expressions of unanimous approval as the hammer fell on Lot 0576 in our September, 2019 auction. The team’s combined academic research, and investigative deliberations, as they strove to eliminate any possibilities of forgery and fakery, had culminated in their unanimous decision to describe the lot as: A magnificent and important gold finger ring; the plain hoop of rounded D-section with baluster shoulders showing diagonal raised line ornament and combed bar at junction with the broad octagonal 'pie' collet cell closed bezel, ... Read moreTanja Maijala, TimeLine Auctions, 18th June 2024
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TimeLine Auctions Top The Royal Pecking Order
If you type the word Vervel in the Simple Search box on the Portable Antiquities Scheme’s website, you can browse several hundred records of vervels and associated finds brought to light by members of the public (mainly detectorists) in England and Wales since the scheme’s launch in 1997. If this is your first encounter with the word vervel, let me explain that it comes from the Old French vervelle meaning leg fetter. In turn, the Old French word derived from the Vulgar Latin vertibulum, which meant leg joint. By the time the word came into widespread use in medieval England it... Read moreAaron Hammond, TimeLine Auctions, 13th June 2024
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Hnefatafl Hunting: English Searchers Make a Good Fist of It
It seems a near certainty that all TimeLine Auctions catalogue readers will have heard of The Lewis Chessmen. Perhaps fewer will be aware that this remarkable group of more than seventy Viking gaming pieces, carved from walrus ivory and sperm whale teeth, came to light on the Scottish island in 1831 when farm animals driven along a Lewis foreshore path strayed from their usual route, trampled part of a sand-dune, and tumbled a stretch of sandstone wall, behind which the herdsman discovered several dozen gaming pieces probably dating from the 12th century. Another agricultural wor... Read moreBrett Hammond (Chief Executive Officer), TimeLine Auctions, 13th March 2024
Ancient Greek Pottery | Attic Black-Figure Neck-Amphora with Gorgon and Quadriga Attributed to the Swing Painter
This Attic Black-Figure, Neck-Amphora offered by Timeline Auctions on the 5 th March 2024 is more than an object of historical and cultural interest. Its narrative bridges the worlds of legend and history to speak to us of the artistic legacy of ancient Greece and the timeless attraction of its myths and heroes. Its creator merges clay and pigment to create a testament to the vibrancy and depth of Athenian culture during the 6th century B.C. The extraordinary vessel, created around 550 BC, brings to life on its curved surface a tale of ancient mythology recounted with artistic brillianc... Read moreAaron Hammond, TimeLine Auctions, 22nd February 2024
Victorian Collectors – v- Victorian Swindlers and Fakers
The Industrial Revolution sparked the construction of a rail network across much of Britain. It also heralded the demolition of many old city centres to provide land for factories, office buildings and workers homes. The upheavals brought an unexpected surge of interest in ancient coins and antiquities among what we might today refer to as the managerial classes. When labouring gangs wielded their picks and shovels to excavate foundations for city halls, banks, chambers of commerce, railway cuttings, and terminal stations in capitals and major provincial centres of population, they frequently ... Read moreTimeLine Auctions, 29th January 2024
SATISFACTION .. For The Winning Bidder
The Bronze Age Minoan civilization centred on the island of Crete and controlling most of the smaller islands in the northern Aegean Sea is named after King Minos from Greek mythology. A bull ravaged his Queen, who later gave birth to the Minotaur, a creature with the body of a man and the head of a bull. King Minos managed to captured the Minotaur and imprisoned it in a labyrinth. The Minoan culture, known primarily for its monumental architecture and its energetic art, is often regarded as Europe’s first civilization. To the Minoans the lotus symbolized strength, rebirth and ... Read moreMichael Healy (Photographer), TimeLine Auctions, 25th January 2024
Mani In Fede Rings .. TimeLine’s Tanja Maijala Describes Their Full Circle.
When the earliest humans first held pointed sticks and turned their bodies through three hundred and sixty degrees, they drew rings on the ground that soon took on magical significance. Men and women saw the endless circle as a symbol of eternity. A few thousand years later Bronze Age artisans cast metal circles of copper. Believers in their powers wore them to ward off misfortune. Today we see evidence of their faith in ancient circles whenever a Bronze Age metal bangle or ring comes under the hammer at a TimeLine Auction. Ancient Egyptians and Greeks appreciated the circle&rsquo... Read moreTanja Maijala, TimeLine Auctions, 18th January 2024
A Long Timeline For Fake Jewellery
2,000 Years Of Popularity Enjoyed By Imitation Gems Whenever you take part in the spirited bidding for one of our Jewellery lots you can enjoy the unconditional assurance that TimeLines vetting staff examined the piece with forensic thoroughness before describing it fully on our catalogue pages. We think of our experts as followers in the footsteps of Gaius Plinius Secundus; better known to us today as Pliny the Elder; who earned international renown for his encyclopaedic work, Natural History. In it he gave us the first records of mineralogical scratch tests to detect fake gems, ... Read moreAaron Hammond (Chief Operating Officer), TimeLine Auctions, 16th January 2024
Isis And The Black Madonna Connection
In early 2020, TimeLine’s meticulous vetting panel examined an unusual potential lot: a rare 14th century pewter pilgrim badge. It passed vetting with flying colours and went forward to our first auction of that year, where it sold for £5,750. As you can see from the accompanying photograph, the badge depicts a busy medieval scene. On the left sits Mary nursing the infant Jesus beneath the shelter of a roofed building. The structure represents a retreat built by a Benedictine monk named Meinrad in the early ninth century when he first arrived as a wandering cleric in that... Read moreDr Raffaele D’Amato, TimeLine Auctions, 12th January 2024
The TimeLine Auctions Vetting Process: “Ils ne passeront pas!”
Several times each year, echoes of that rousing declaration strengthen the resolve of TimeLine Auctions Expert Vetting team as they gather around a boardroom table at TimeLine’s offices. They are about to embark on the mammoth task of minutely examining each potential lot vying for a place in TimeLine’s forthcoming auction. Vetters must prevent fakes and forgeries reaching the bidding room. Their determination to win that battle matches the French army’s resolve when it repulsed the Boche at Verdun in 1916. Many weeks before those Big Guns of the core vetting tea... Read moreTanja Maijala, TimeLine Auctions, 3rd January 2024
What’s Your Tipple?
Blowing froth from a pot brimming with best bitter .. or ... sipping China tea from ornate miniature cups at a dolls’ tea party? What can those two pleasurable activities possibly have had in common? Answer: PEWTER. From the early 17th century pewter tankards (the lidded versions of the pots) began to grow in popularity among labourers who caroused on Saturday evenings at alehouses and taverns across England. Pewter possessed the advantage of robust strength, a quality needed in the rough-and-tumble atmosphere generated by alcoholic fumes. When altercations broke out, fi... Read moreAaron Hammond (Chief Operating Officer), TimeLine Auctions, 30th May 2023
Brief Observations on Lot 4
The hammer price + Bp (£5,200) achieved by Lot No. 0004 (Fowl-Roasting Scene) in TimeLine Auction's 23 May 23rd 2023 sale delighted all in attendance. Bidders and onlookers around the room seemed to share an empathic moment as the tableau of a cook roasting a spitted bird over a fire-bowl came under scrutiny. We have all been there; in Christmas kitchens, or around back-garden barbecues; attentively twiddling fan-assisted oven controls; or wafting charcoal briquettes to coax a little more heat to work its magic on the pallid pink poultry skin. Yet Lot No. 0004’s ... Read moreMichael Healy (Photographer), TimeLine Auctions, 26th May 2023
Her Life at Stake for Coining a Fake
TimeLine researchers expose wrongdoers who create, and attempt to sell, spurious coins and antiquities. Such crimes have, of course, occurred throughout history. Fakers, when exposed, have suffered severe retribution. TimeLine recently uncovered a newspaper report on the execution of an 18th century coiner. Not much of a headline story, you might imagine. After all, several hundred counterfeiters paid with their lives during the reign of George III. But two striking facts jumped out from the newspaper page as this amazing eye-witness account was read by TimeLine staff: the fake maker... Read moreTanja Maijala (Head of Administration), TimeLine Auctions, 16th May 2023
From Pieces Of Eight .. to Pieces of Two
Collectors from countries across the world know and admire the Spanish silver 8 reales as a handsome numismatic piece. Its accuracy of weight, purity of silver, and milled edge as a safeguard against clipping, also gave the denomination an international reputation. In the 18th and early 19th centuries reales were the currency of world trade. During those years the silver eight reales was known, throughout all English-speaking colonies, and in post-Colonial America, as the Spanish Dollar. (See TimeLine Auctions archived catalogues for several examples we have auctioned in the past.) F... Read moreBrett Hammond (Chief Executive Officer), TimeLine Auctions, 11th May 2023
Charles I, II, III: A Trio of Controversial Coronations
All three English monarchs named Charles have divided public opinion on issues that cast shadows on their crowning ceremonies. On the other hand, all three have bequeathed to us interesting coin issues worth adding to our collections. Let’s run through some of the time lines and historical events that connect the enthronements of these kings. Charles Stuart became Prince of Wales in 1616. His father, King James, hoped his son would marry a Spanish princess, and that England and Spain would then form an alliance to end costly European wars. A personal visit by Charles to the Spanish ... Read moreBrett Hammond (Chief Executive Officer), TimeLine Auctions, 2nd May 2023
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The Men of Bronze
An important change in the Greek burial customs took place around 700 B.C. when the men were no longer buried with their weaponry. At the same time, the old monarchies disappeared giving way to the aristocratic governments based on the new urban structure of the Poleis. At first, the Aristoi were able control the power within the cities, creating an aristocratic republic. This was soon followed by the change in economic situation, which was based upon the development of the commerce and craftsmanship, and favoured the rising of the middle classes of the demos (the people). These social chan... Read moreDr Raffaele D’Amato, archaeologist at L.A.D., Laboratorio Antiche Province Danubiane, University of Ferrara, 28 April 2023
Fantasy or Fake?
TimeLine has included several lots of Billy and Charlie’s strange artefacts in past auctions; and today’s TimeLine vetting staff are well prepared for any forthcoming challenge to decide whether an offered lot is a genuine fake .. or a fake of a fake Billy and Charlie. The popularity of the originals is such that fakers have indeed been at work attempting to cash-in on heightened interest. You may rest assured that TimeLine is woke to their fake making… The 1840s and 1850s were decades that had witnessed tremendous growth of interest in historical items disc... Read moreAaron Hammond (Chief Operating Officer), TimeLine Auctions, 24th April 2023
Nothing Fake About These Deadly Leaden Missiles
TimeLine researchers recently learned of ancient shepherds equipped with slings, who fired holed pebbles over their flocks when the herders wanted the animals to move to fresh grazing grounds. The whistling sounds thus generated unsettled the sheep and goats and encouraged them to change direction as they wandered. When similarly holed projectiles, in this case made from lead, came to light during excavations at Burnswark Iron Age hillfort in Dumfriesshire, the possibility that noise generation provided a motive for firing them provoked lively discussion among the excavators. Here is what the ... Read moreBrett Hammond (Chief Executive Officer), TimeLine Auctions, 18th April 2023
Official Replica Alfred The Great Penny Compared to a Becker Fake
An Alfred the Great coin, with LONDONIA monogram reverse, was submitted to TimeLine Auctions recently. This is always a popular Anglo-Saxon lot, especially sought-after by London’s many collectors hoping to add examples from the capital’s early mint to their cabinets. TimeLine’s numismatic vetting team had examined the piece prior to its acceptance in our sale, so we had supreme confidence in its authenticity. Ninety-nine years earlier, at the 1924 British Empire Exhibition, the Royal Mint’s pavilion included a group of mint workers who wore Anglo-Sax... Read moreBrett Hammond (Chief Executive Officer), TimeLine Auctions, 12th April 2023
TimeLine Auctions - “Et tu, Brute?”
The pugio, renowned in literature as the hidden weapon carried by each of the conspirators who assassinated Julius Caesar, was also the battle dagger most favoured by the Roman legionary when he fought at close-quarters on bloody battlefields across the Empire. It is thought that the Romans first encountered foes armed with short, triangular bladed daggers with two-disc hilts during their decades of savage warfare against the Celtiberians in Spain. The long war culminated in an eight-month blockade of Numantia, a tribal city where many of the inhabitants chose suicide rather than sub... Read moreAaron Hammond (Chief Operating Officer), TimeLine Auctions, 6th April 2023
Casting Lamplight on Ancient Fakes
TimeLine Auctions fights its continuous campaign against fakers by rigorously vetting and scientifically testing material to be offered for sale at each of our auctions. Later a panel of external experts convenes, normally over three days, to carry out first-hand examination of the auction lots. Our system allows for independent assessment of material before it wins approval for inclusion in our sales. This quest to root out fakes commenced many years before TimeLine picked up the banner and took up the challenge. One of our recent lots – a Roman oil lamp with the word FORTI... Read moreBrett Hammond (Chief Executive Officer), TimeLine Auctions, 3rd April 2023
TimeLine Auctions - The Return of Young Bacchus
When I started working full time for TimeLine Auctions back in 2020, I decided that one of my main goals was to support my team to continue to improve the process of identifying possibly stolen or looted items in the art market. Our hard work was rewarded at the beginning of this year, when we played an instrumental part in the return of the statue of a young Bacchus, stolen from Musée du Pays Châtillonnais in December 1973. Witnessing the joy of Catherine Monnet, director of the museum, when she received the 1st century Gallo-Roman masterpiece back, was everything that ... Read moreDr Raffaele D’Amato, archaeologist at L.A.D., Laboratorio Antiche Province Danubiane, University of Ferrara, 13 April 2023
