Ancient Persian Gold Cup sold for $100,000

[ladybright]

This made me smile. It looks like he [/I]really[/I] had an eye for quality.

DORCHESTER, England (CNN) -- Englishman John Webber thought nothing of the small shiny cup, passed down from his junk dealer grandfather and stashed under a bed for years -- until appraisers said it was an ancient Persian artifact.

The ancient Persian gold cup, thought to date from the third or fourth century B.C., fetched $100,000 at auction.

The five-and-a-half-inch gold cup -- which experts have dated as being possibly from the third or fourth century B.C. -- fetched $100,000 at an auction in Dorchester, southern England, Thursday.

The identify of the successful bidder wasn't immediately known.

The relic features the double faced ancient Roman god Janus, the god of gates and doors who always looked to both the future and past and is often associated with beginnings and endings. The cup has two faces with braided hair and entwined snake ornaments at the forehead.

Webber's grandfather, William Sparks, was a rag and bone man, the British term for a junk dealer, Duke's said, who established the iron merchants Sparks and Son in Taunton, Somerset, in southwestern England, in the 1930s. ....

source

[nordicdusk]

Im sure there are plenty of things around like this that people have no clue as to the value and historical value of the ithem. We are too fast to throw out anything that we see as gathering dust. Its a shame really. How many things have been lost forever because people never checked what they were.

[Gorm the Old]

I would have thought that Mr. Webber would have noticed the unusual weight of the cup. Gold weighs nearly 3 1/2 times as much as an equivalent volume of brass or bronze.