Is Provenance Important? Add Value?

In terms of value, most surviving provenances don't really add much value. You'd need a coin to be in the hands of either a famous person or at least a famous collector to have a significant impact on value. John Quincy Adams was a coin collector (as well as being a US President) and most of the ancient coins from his family collection are fully provenanced back to him, and those coins fetch considerably more at auction than an equivalent but unprovenanced example. Here's a Doug Smith article on FORVM about it.

For most collectors and most provenances, knowing the provenance is "interesting", but not really "important". It becomes important if it's an old, established provenance and if/when you ever decide to leave the country and take your coins with you.

Many countries have proscriptions against importing or exporting ancient coins without a pre-1970 provenance. These laws and regulations are in place to attempt to combat smuggling of looted antiquities, and ancient coins are "Antiquities" under these laws. If caught attempting to cross the border of such countries with ancient coins, it's a case of guilty until proven innocent: if you can't prove that the coin wasn't looted, then the authorities will assume that it was. A receipt from a coin dealer is insufficient proof, as there is no guarantee the coin wasn't smuggled by the dealer (or whoever sold it to the dealer). Evidence that the coin was being bought and sold prior to 1970 is the strongest evidence you can supply for a coin's legality in such cases. And that's where the provenance can help.

The United States has signed Memoranda of Understanding with numerous countries regarding the interception and repatriation of looted imported antiquities sourced from those countries. So even if you are travelling to a "safe" country without such laws (such as Britain or Australia), you may run into trouble on your return home, attempting to re-import your own coins into the United States.

"1970" is the chosen date because that was the year that the UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property came into effect.

Interesting point regarding the import and export of "antiquities," in this case ancient coins. How does a buyer in the US know if they are buying a coin that is legally in the country? I doubt many of the coins sold in American coin stores and auctions have any provenance as far back as 1970.

In short, they can't, and they don't - unless there's some kind of provenance with the coin. When a seller in the US sells an ancient coin already in the US to a US customer, no crime is committed, because buying and selling ancient coins isn't illegal or even regulated in the US - it's only importing them that's the potential problem.

This is of course the reason why coin smuggling into the United States is such an issue - once the coins arrive on US soil and clear customs, there's little that the source country can do to get them back. They have to be very valuable, high-profile coins for the source nation to bother going through the expensive and convoluted American legal system to try to repatriate them. Most famously in recent years, an Ides of March gold aureus, struck by Brutus after Caesar's assassination and worth millions, was repatriated to Greece after Greek authorities proved it was illegally dug up in Greece and smuggled out of that country. The British coin dealer who sold the coin through an American auction house had lied and made up a fake provenance to try to cover up the theft; the lie only came to light when the alleged previous owner publicly denounced the coin, saying it was never his. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/22/...eid-mar.html

When collecting ancients, ALWAYS keep a record of who you bought from and the original flip and/or paperwork. As mentioned in this thread, it undoubtedly adds value. How much? Well that's subjective. A lot in my opinion -

Whether it be from a well known private seller and/or collection, storefront or auction. Case in point, I would have never picked up a Pertinax denarius, but the provenance was the deciding factor - Dr. Donald Zauche of Westminster, Maryland, a very well-respected dealer and scholar.