eBay seller called ancientroman


also calls themselves Ancient Roman Intaglio


They write:

Hi there, Welcome to our eBay Store, We are a long time Antique dealer Based in Thailand,United Arab Emirates,United Kingdom,Japan and China, We come from a family of antique dealers and now we finally thought to give the online Antique market a try, Most of Our items are acquired from United Kingdom & Afghanistan, Most of the items we've listed we ship from Thailand, Bangkok, We deal in all kinds of Ancient & Vintage Antiques anything from the Bactrian,Roman,Sasanian,Islamic and all other kinds and ages of antiques, We sell Anything from Ancient Roman glass, Ancient beads, Ancient gold, Cylinder seals, scaraboids-Seals, Seal stamps, Islamic ceramics, Seal stamps and all other kinds of Antiques, As we are new eBay seller we do not have much reviews but rest assured we are a reliable Seller, We ship out items within one day of receiving clear PayPal payment and we provided a tracking number immediately, For more inquires Please don't hesitate to contact us, Follow us for more Info.


https://www.ebay.com/sch/ancientroman/m.html?item=133536107506&hash=item1f175f4bf2%3Ag%3ANRgAAOSw%7EgxfeIUG&rt=nc&_trksid=p2047675.l2562


 The vast majority of what the offer for sale is  NOT ANCIENT. Look at their Bactrian composite figurines. Fresh from the little factory! They ship direct from the factories and offer groups and multiples at big discounts.

................and WE have been telling rthe world this for years and years...!

See shots from inside his place below.

To preserve all this here in case original sources not available later


https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/25/arts/design/fake-antiquities-investigation.html

https://granthshala.com/he-sold-antiquities-for-decades-many-of-them-fake-investigators-say/

https://www.intimes.in/2021/08/25/he-sold-antiquities-for-decades-many-of-them-fake-investigators-say/

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For years, law enforcement has prioritised the recovery of looted antiquities, not only because the smuggling of ancient artefacts harms the cultural heritage of their countries of origin, but also because illicit sales have sometimes funded the operations of drug gangs or terrorist organisations.

However, prosecutors claim that Mehrdad Sadigh, a New York antiquities dealer whose gallery has been operating in the shadow of the Empire State Building for decades, decided not to go through the trouble of acquiring ancient items.

Instead, he allegedly created thousands of phoney antiquities in a warren of offices just off his display area and then sold them to unsophisticated and overeager collectors.

“For many years, this phoney antiquities mill in midtown Manhattan promised customers rare treasures from the ancient world and instead sold them pieces manufactured on-site in cookie-cutter fashion,” Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. said in a statement following Mr. Sadigh’s arrest earlier this month.

Mr. Sadigh has pleaded not guilty to charges of deception, grand larceny, criminal possession of a forged instrument, forgery, and criminal simulation.

According to prosecutors, among those he sold to were undercover federal investigators who paid $4,000 for a gold pendant depicting Tutankhamen’s death mask and a marble portrait head of an ancient Roman woman. These sales prompted a visit to the gallery in August by members of the district attorney’s office and Homeland Security investigations, who claimed to have discovered hundreds of fake artefacts on shelves and inside glass cases. Thousands more, they claimed, had been discovered in the rooms behind the gallery, including scarabs, statuettes, and spear heads in various stages of preparation.

According to Matthew Bogdanos, the chief of the district attorney’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit, the visit revealed a sort of assembly-line process designed to distress and otherwise alter mass-produced items of recent vintage so they appear aged. Investigators discovered varnish, spray paints, a belt sander, and mudlike substances of various hues and consistencies, among other tools and materials, he said.

Mr. Sadigh’s lawyer, Gary Lesser, declined to comment on Tuesday.

According to the district attorney’s office, Mr. Sadigh appeared to be one of the country’s largest purveyors of fake artefacts based on the longevity of his business, the number of items seized from his gallery, and his “substantial financial gains.”

Mr. Sadigh had run his gallery for decades, describing it on its website as “a family-owned art gallery specialising in ancient artefacts and coins from around the world.”

The gallery was founded in 1978 as a small mail-order company, according to the website, and in 1982 it relocated to a suite of offices on the upper floor of a building at Fifth Avenue and East 31st Street.

Mr. Sadigh sold items he claimed were Anatolian, Babylonian, Byzantine, Greco-Roman, Mesopotamian, and Sumerian from his location there. The gallery’s website included an antiquities blog as well as customer testimonials. Google reviews were filled with client accounts, some of whom said they had been shopping there for years and many of whom mentioned how much they appreciated the personal service.

A mummified falcon dated to 305-30 B.C. ($9,000), an Egyptian sarcophagus mask carved from wood and dated to 663-525 B.C. ($5,000), and an iron and nickel fragment from a meteorite that landed in Mongolia ($1,500) were among the items listed for sale on the website in late 2020 and early 2021.

According to the website, “all of our antiquities are guaranteed authentic.”

Mr. Sadigh was brought to the attention of investigators pursuing other dealers involved in the trafficking of looted antiquities, who complained, according to Mr. Bogdanos, that his office was not paying attention to “the guy selling all the fakes.”

When investigators looked into the Sadigh gallery, Mr. Bogdanos said they found someone “too big to not investigate,” rather than a sidewalk peddler of cheap knockoffs.

Mr. Bogdanos recognised a copy of an 11th-century ceramic Khmer Buddha sculpture in the gallery; the original had been seized by the district attorney’s office in a separate case. Other items in the gallery appeared to be replicas of stolen objects from the Iraq Museum, thefts that Mr. Bogdanos assisted in investigating while serving as a Marine colonel in Iraq in 2003.

(Mr. Bogdanos led an effort to recover thousands of items looted by looters during Baghdad’s fall.)

Following Mr. Sadigh’s arrest, prosecutors obtained a second warrant allowing them to search for tools used in the modification of antiquities or “objects purporting to be antiquities,” as well as items such as a $50,000 sarcophagus, a $40,000 cylinder seal, and a $25,000 statue of the goddess Artemis, all of which were suspected of being fakes.

Mr. Sadigh had previously been associated with a dispute over the authenticity of items he had sold, despite his positive online reviews.
This refers to the matter in the posting one before above regarding : https://westbranchtimes.com/article.php?id=15693

https://westbranchtimes.com/article.php?id=15693

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Hoover exhibit canceled over questionable artifacts
by Gregory R. Norfleet · News · April 25, 2019


The Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum last week canceled the opening of the Rosetta Stone exhibit after a professor raised questions regarding the authenticity of a majority of the items.
University of Iowa Associate Professor Bjorn Anderson of the Art and Art History department wrote an April 10 letter to the museum stating that 90 of 125 items in the exhibit, set to open Friday, “are either definite or very likely fakes.”

The company that owns the exhibit is the Origins Museum Institute. The institute’s Marty Martin said he purchased the items about 20 years ago and did not know the items were forgeries.

“It’s a horrible situation,” Martin said. “We had been assured they were authentic pieces and paid handsomely for them.”

Anderson’s letter states that many, if not all, of the items appear to be from Sadigh Gallery of New York. Martin stated that he purchased the items from Sadigh Gallery.

Michael Sadigh said he has run the Sadigh Gallery for more than 15 years but it would be difficult for him to speak to an antiquities sale that long ago.

“I don’t know anything about this,” Sadigh said. “I wasn’t here 20 years ago. They purchased it 20 years ago and somebody now says they’re not real? I don’t know what to say.”

Hoover Library and Museum Director Thomas Schwartz said that the claims of authenticity were key to canceling​ the opening​.

“A great many pieces were presented as authentic and that’s wherein the problem lies,” Schwartz said.

Martin said he does not have the “authority or expertise” to authenticate the items in the Rosetta Stone exhibit, and that he made that clear to the Hoover Museum, and trusted that they were authentic because the seller stated so.

“I didn’t mislead them about giving guarantees,” Martin said. “We trusted the source we got them from. They assured us they were authentic. I do not want (the Hoover Museum) to think we tried to fool them. I was proud of owning those pieces.”

Schwartz said Anderson and graduate assistant Erin Daly on April 5 examined the Rosetta Stone exhibit after the museum invited them to give a talk in June on some of the exhibit highlights. Anderson said he and Daly, an expert on Zodiac seals, visited and took pictures of the items to take back to their offices.

Anderson said that, while they were leaving, Daly commented that she was suspicious of the seals on many of the items, adding that “I’ve never seen any that big or that nice.”

When they looked at sadighgallery.com, they found many other items with seals of similar quality, and Anderson wondered — and mentioned in his findings to the museum — how the gallery’s website could offer “11 copies of the same statue for sale” if the statues are authentic.

He noted that statues of the same shape can be purchased in different patinas — green, gold, blue, etc.

“How does this work?” he said.

Anderson sent a letter to the museum on April 10 laying out the evidence. Schwartz said after reviewing Anderson’s letter and its appendices that it appeared that the possibility of making these items this way “in the ancient world was next to nil.”

The Hoover Museum arranged the exhibit, but the Hoover Presidential Foundation provided the funding. Foundation President Jerry Fleagle said he supports Schwartz’s decision to cancel and the Foundation wants a refund from Origins Museum.

“I support Tom — he made the right decision,” Fleagle said. “I’m sure that if he knew ahead of time (about the forgeries) he wouldn’t have booked the exhibit.”

From talking with museum staff, Fleagle believes the research was thorough to reach the conclusion the pieces were fake.

“There were just way too many questions,” he said. “You can’t put out an exhibit and advertise the exhibit when it’s not authentic.”

Schwartz said that many traveling exhibits include replicas — and state that up-front — for a variety of reasons, like security and insurance purposes. He said Origins Museum truthfully reported that the centerpiece item, the Rosetta Stone, was cast from the original.

Schwartz said that when museums display exhibits with replicas, they identify those pieces as such in the exhibit. However, after some discussion regarding the Rosetta Stone exhibit, the staff felt it inappropriate even putting the items on display with a note that the items were reproductions or facsimiles.

“We could say the Rosetta Stone was cast from the original, but for the other pieces, we didn’t know if they had actual counterparts someplace,” the director said. “So, after a lot of discussions with Professor Anderson and people in Washington and the Foundation, we thought it was just prudent to cut our losses and not open the show.”

Fleagle said the Foundation put up half of the cost for the exhibit a year and a half ago when it booked the date and paid the second half when the items arrived at the museum.

He declined to share the amount paid, but said it was “not as expensive as others, but not a small amount, either.”

“It will take some time to get our money back,” he said. “I’d rather do it friendly and not use legal action.”

Martin agreed that the Hoover Museum should cancel his company’s exhibit based on their findings.

“This is a terrible calamity for us,” Martin said. “My sympathies go with the people who took them in good faith. I’ve been in communication with the gallery, and they deny the questioning of the authenticity.”

Sadigh said he did not remember receiving a call from Martin regarding the Rosetta Stone exhibit.

“I talk to hundreds of people a day here,” he said. “I will have to do some research.”

Martin said he will seek reparations from Sadigh, which he hopes to use to reimburse the Foundation.

Sadigh said he does not want any bad publicity for his gallery and considered a news article based on someone’s verbal statement regarding his company “not proper.”

“I’m trying to help you as much as I can,” he told the Times. “I don’t like to get wrong or bad publicity. … I do not want to be accused.”

Fleagle noted that legal action is not out of the question and that many of the Foundation board of trustees are themselves lawyers.

“This is a disappointment to everybody all the way around,” Fleagle said. “Fortunately it was discovered before rather than after. Now we can move forward.”



Back-up plan

It so happens that the museum already had an exhibit prepared, Schwartz said.

Due to the five-week-long partial government shutdown that ended in late January, the museum had to cancel an exhibit already in the works and organized by its own staff.

That exhibit, “Collaborative Collectors: Herbert and Lou Hoover,” will replace the Rosetta Stone exhibit, which Schwartz said will be ready by May 18 and run through October 27.

Fleagle said he was glad to see the previously canceled exhibit of rarely seen Hoover items now get a chance for public viewing.

“I can guarantee they will all be authentic,” Fleagle said. “It will be a good exhibit.”

Thanks for the feedback, guys, much appreciated. Yes indeed i purchased it from Antiquiti on ebay. Had no clue who he was at the time. Only paid £26 though. Probably worthless, then. Wonder if it's even silver as claimed. Have now thoroughly read the threads concerning antiquiti/mike. May just keep it as an oddity given i didn't pay much. God sake😆🤦🏻