The antiquities will be up for sale in London today, but the auction houses are facing a call to withdraw them.
A pair of Etruscan bronze attachments, dating from circa early fifth century BC, are expected to sell for between £50,000 and $70,000. A bronze lamp from the eighth century BC is estimated to be between £2,000 and £3,000.
If the auction houses had done a better job of checking the legality of the antiquities they would not have offered them for sale.
Both Bonhams and Sotheby's disagreed. The items were not obtained illegally or exported to another country, according to Bonhams. The market participant was called on by the company to give the information he has.
A bronze boat-shaped lamp is in the Bonhams lot. The photograph is of Bonhams.
There is photographic evidence that shows the antiquities were once owned by discredited dealers.
The photos are among tens of thousands of images and other archival documents given to him by Italian prosecution authorities after their seizure in police raids because his academic research focuses on antiquities and trafficking networks, according to the Guardian.
The archives of the British antiquities dealer Robin Symes, who served a jail sentence in 2005 for ignoring court orders over the sale of a $3m Egyptian statue, and of the Italian antiquities dealer Gianfranco Becchina, who was convicted in 2011 of illegally dealing in antiquities, are included in Italy's culture ministry said in 2016 that marble statues and other treasures were recovered by Italian and Swiss police from Symes in Switzerland.
The history given by the company for lot 68 goes back to 1978. The same items were sold in the New York sale room in 2010. The same objects are in the Symes archive. I have two images, one black and white and one colour.
He claimed to have pictures of the Bonhams lamp in the archive. The exact dimensions of one of the images have been given by Bonhams.
An image of a lamp. There is a photograph of Christos Tsirogiannis.
A former senior field archaeologist at the University of Cambridge, Tsirogiannis is now an associate professor at the University of Aarhus.
Over the course of 15 years, he has identified more than 1,500 looted artifacts within auction houses, commercial galleries, private collections and museums. He helps to get antiquities back to their rightful owners.
If he is correct, he claimed, it shows that no one is checking with the authorities. It is shocking that it is still happening.
An image of a lamp from the archive of a convicted dealer. The picture is of Christos Tsirogiannis.
The items that Bonhams accepts for sale are legitimate on the market and have not been illegally exported from their country of origin. We work closely with the relevant authorities.
The materials in the Symes archives are completely out of reach for all of us.
The auctioneers would not need access to his archives if they had made enough checks with the relevant authorities.
