ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors participated in Countering Looting of Antiquities from Syria and Iraq, a project organized by the Terrorism, Transnational Crime, and Corruption Center of George Mason University and funded by the US State Department. They began to address this question by examining the coin market, with a focus on eBay in particular. Roman imperial coinage and provincial issues of the various cities in Syria are extremely common. Syria was at times given as a provenance for coin hoards from Turkey, since the import of coins from Syria into European countries and the US was generally seen as unproblematic with such a provenance. The substantial increase of online transactions on eBay resulted in a shift towards massive sales of large quantities of low-end items. An important aspect to ancient coins, which is often neglected, is that these represent archaeological objects recovered through excavations from the ground or the seabed.
