I bought a meteorite for like £2.50
this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2024
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Roman coins is the first thing that came to mind. There's a ton of them out there and museums don't want any more either. You can get one for quite cheap.
I find it fascinating that, because the Roman empire was so vast and lasted for so long, their defunct money is now strewn all over Europe.
It does help when it's made of metal
You would think that because of that, people would melt them down when they became no longer useful as currency.
I got a bag of them for $8 on ebay
You can buy single pages of old books/manuscripts on auction sites for that or even much less sometimes. Maybe not the oldest available, but it's the oldest thing I've ever bought. I have mine framed in the hall.
There's a bunch of ancient Egyptian cosmetic spoons floating around you might be able to pick up at a flea market.
Wildly unethical to buy given that they were looted from egypt.
I worked at auctions, being the offline 'online' buyer, so people could use me as an in person bidder for that online platform. I saw a ~~3500~~ 800 ish year old tiny Aztec sculpture go for 260 euro, around 2015. I was like, do I need to call the cops? What is happening?
How did you get into this job? It actually sounds quite fun, except it's something I'd never have considered doing because I didn't know it existed.
I worked in high end (food/event)service but my employer at the time had very diverse partnerships, one of them was offering this service and had the programmers themselves be present at the auctions too. But then they grew and couldn't fill all requests and we struck a partnership. I fit right in because of my above average IT knowledge in comparison with other service colleagues.
There's a ton of offline"-online" auction services now a day, live bidding whatever you call it. You could google a couple of them inform them of your interest.
The job itself was fun, so many objects I had never seen before! Very cool. It was also stressful, auctioning is live and sometimes the lot being auctioned off is worth a lot. Super fun to see your live-auction-system shit itself right in the middle of a 3 way bidding war
Just describing it sounds fun. "I am an in person online bidder" "what?" "You heard me..."
Proxies at auctions are actually quite common. There are plenty of people who have neither of the time nor interest to show up in person, so they just pay someone to do it for them.
3500 yrs ago would be olmec probably
Definitely something was wrong there. Aztecs became a thing about 800 years ago.
Hmmm, maybe it was 800yo instead of 800 bc or something, excuse me, but definitely Aztec!
Definitely 800 years ago, not 800 BC
This is a great opportunity for a mom joke
Damn it, beat me to it
Is your mom an archaeologist?
Cause I have a large bone for her to examine.
There are 10,000-year-old arrowheads sold for that much or less. They're not scarce or sacred or anything; they're literally weapons that were made in mass quantities for warfare or hunting.
I’ve seen some BC bronze arrowheads listed for auction and were surprised how cheap they were.
There's a lot of fake "bronze" stuff coming out of China, so keep an eye out.
I like this one because it's one step up from a rock and minimally qualifies the object as a human making.
Well, the earliest ones that were not mass produced are valuable even though they aree the smallest step up from a rock. It is the later, well made ones that are extremely common because they were made and used for thousands of years that are not.
You could get a handful of Roman coins for less than $5 if you don't care about the quality. Or this $96.94 silver Hadrian coin from approximately 117-138 CE
you can find paleolithic tools for less than that on ebay, but i would assume there are lots of fakes posted for sale
Pretty sure you could get a bit of mummy for that price
Are you my mummy?
Bit weird to sell bits of your own mum, mate.
/s
To eat?
If you’d like the taste of linen and bone dust
More likely to make paint with.
But yes.
In the British Empire, ancient Egyptian cat mummies were sold as fertilizer.
And the rest! Human mummies were ground up and used for a paint called "mummy brown". Artists only stopped using it because the supply of mummies dried up (lol).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummy_brown
During the Egyptomania phase in Victorian times, rich folk would hold mummy unwrapping parties... and not just in England.
You can buy ancient Roman pottery fragments for much less than that.
Amphorae were the plastic bottles and shipping containers of the ancient world.
Their shards are found en masse in every archaeological dig.
Same with paleolithic bifaces and arrowheads.
Interestingly, there are so many whole amphorae because whenever there was an earthquake or eruption, people would put their amphorae under an arched window or doorway, as they were the strongest parts of their houses, and less likely to collapse onto their amphora full of food
If we are talking oldest, Romans are babies in the crib!
I second pottery shards - they are abundant and go back tens of thousands of years. Even if you wanted a "complete" item, potsherds were used for all types of purposes as complete tools, building materials, writing surfaces, etc.
Same with paleolithic bifaces and arrowheads.
You have to do some shopping around if you want a nice one under a hundred nowadays. But OPs requirement wasn't for it to look good
You can even buy old coins. Novel pieces of history to have if that you’re thing.
Guessing a book. Or maybe an arrowhead. Hopefully a collector or historian will weigh in. It's a fun question.
The arrowhead sounds more viable. The oldest ones can be thousands of years old, and the prices are all over the place. Fancy ones cost a fortune, while a badly beaten one will be well within the budget.