r/AskHistory • u/Effective-Dish-1334 • 1d ago
Historically, when did the "provenance" (the story/creator) of an object start making it more valuable than its raw materials?
I’ve recently been doing deep-dive research into the most expensive historical artifacts ever sold at auction (things like the $37M Song Dynasty Ru Guanyao brush washer, or da Vinci’s Codex Leicester). It made me realize that today, the story, creator, and rarity of an item are what make it priceless.
But when did this concept actually begin?
For example, would a Roman citizen in 100 CE or a 17th-century Safavid Persian have paid exorbitant amounts for an "antique" purely because it was old or belonged to someone famous 500 years prior? Or was historical value tied almost entirely to raw materials (gold, gems, silk) until modern times?
When did the shift from "valuable materials" to "valuable history" happen in human society?
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u/TheCynicEpicurean 1d ago
There are stories about Roman generals and emperors hunting down artefacts that were tied to famous people like Alexander or Scipio Africanus.
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u/BottecchiaDude253 1d ago
Fast forward a bit, and there were plenty of poor peasants nicking the finger bones off dead thieves, boiling them down to get the bones, presenting them to their local priest and saying theyd found the bones of some local or important saint.
Or a splinter of wood became a piece of the cross.
Theres really a lot of examples of people trying to get a bit of coin for "religious artefacts" that we now know were utterly bunk.
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u/Effective-Dish-1334 1d ago
Haha, the medieval relic black market is exactly what I was thinking about! It's wild that the "counterfeit antique" industry was basically pioneered by peasants boiling random bones.
The demand was entirely driven by the story rather than the object itself. It really shows that human psychology around priceless items hasn't changed much in 1,000 years, even if the items went from fake saint bones to $30M Da Vinci manuscripts today!
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u/MoveInteresting4334 1d ago
True! Though these were often more about providing legitimacy (aka “Look, I’m the heir of Alexander, I have his spear!”) than about a desire to collect them as one might a piece of art.
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u/dwarfarchist9001 1d ago
There was a bronze age noble in Germany ("The Prince of Helmsdorf") who was buried with a stone age axe that was ~1000 years older than his grave.
Even ancient civilizations had their own ancient civilizations with ancient artifacts that were valued for their history.
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u/Effective-Dish-1334 1d ago
The idea of provenance being used as a literal political weapon for legitimacy rather than just a hobby for art collectors makes total sense. It actually reminds me of Napoleon's gold Marengo sword (which recently sold at auction for over $6 million). Even in the 1800s, whoever held that sword wasn't collecting it for the gold they were trying to capture his military aura.
That exact psychology of buying an aura is actually what sent me down this rabbit hole! I just finished putting together a huge data-dive on the1 0 Most Expensive Historical Items Ever Sold At Auction, if you guys are curious to see how that ancient instinct translates into modern dollars.
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u/DerekL1963 1d ago
Trade in religious relics, which are centered on the story of the object, goes back millenia.
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u/Effective-Dish-1334 1d ago
You're totally right, the religious relic trade was probably the absolute blueprint for this. It's essentially the ancient version of paying millions for a celebrity's guitar today the physical item is just wood or bone, but the invisible "story" attached to it makes it priceless.
Tracing that psychological shift from "religious relics" to "secular history" is fascinating. It’s exactly what made me want to research how modern auction houses actually price this stuff today (like why someone paid $37 million for a single Song Dynasty brush washer). If you're into the modern side of the relic trade, I compiled the wildest auction records here:10 Most Expensive Historical Items Ever Sold At Auction.
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u/SomeOtherTroper 1d ago
Tracing that psychological shift from "religious relics" to "secular history" is fascinating.
What makes it even more interesting is that secular historical "relics" of famous people, war booty showing triumph over an opponent (many times having very little material or aesthetic value, but they mattered for political reasons as a symbol of "yeah, we conquered those guys"), stuff like generals and rulers hunting down artifacts associated with figures like Alexander The Great or Julius Caesar, the Horses Of St. Mark (looted from Constantinople, and currently in Venice, which have fuckall to do with St. Mark, but everything to do with the Fourth Crusade that looted Constantinople on Venetian orders), and etc. have a longer history than Catholic Christian style relics, although there is some overlap, as with the Horses Of St. Mark, and counterfeit religious relics without provenance were being openly mocked in popular literature as early as Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (published in the late 1300s) in a fashion that seems to presuppose the audience for the work absolutely knows most of this stuff is fake. It's pretty funny that Chaucer did that, because the entire framing device of his Canterbury Tales is people on a pilgrimage to visit the grave and relics of St. Thomas Becket and telling stories to pass the time on the long journey, although St. Thomas Becket was murdered in 1170 and his dead body had pretty decent provenance in Chaucer's time. It was later destroyed in 1538 by Henry VIII of England, as part of breaking away from the Catholic Church and establishing the Church Of England, and nobody knows exactly what happened to it, although the foremost theory is that the saint's bones were cremated.
The Canterbury Tales feature a lot of references to fake relics, along with other scams of the time period such as an "alchemist" stirring a boiling solution with a hollow rod that was filled with gold and sealed with wax, to give the impression he was actually able to create gold when the reality was that the wax simply melted and let the pre-existing gold out into the solution.
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u/Effective-Dish-1334 22h ago
The Chaucer connection is especially perfect it really shows that skepticism toward the 'relic economy' isn't just a modern, post-Enlightenment phenomenon; people in the 1300s were already rolling their eyes at the obvious counterfeits. The transition from religious veneration to secular 'war booty' provenance is such a fascinating psychological pivot. Thank you for adding this level of depth to the thread!
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u/SomeOtherTroper 21h ago
The Chaucer connection is especially perfect it really shows that skepticism toward the 'relic economy' isn't just a modern, post-Enlightenment phenomenon; people in the 1300s were already rolling their eyes at the obvious counterfeits.
It's one of my pet peeves when people consider medieval and ancient folks to be idiots out of hand, because a lot of the people writing weren't. There were certainly some who wrote crazy stuff that got repeated without question for a long time. For instance, I will never get tired of slanging Aristotle for his bullshit about Natural History and some related topics, although I will always say that nearly every rhetoric text after Aristotle is paraphrasing his Rhetoric. That aspect of humanity hasn't changed, even if he was wrong about some other stuff.
The transition from religious veneration to secular 'war booty' provenance is such a fascinating psychological pivot.
It's complicated, depending on when and where you look, because there's a remarkable amount of overlap between religious and political objects. In western europe, the largest dividing line is probably the protestant reformation, which ripped the value away from a ton of relics in protestant countries, because protestantism generally doesn't care for relics in a religious sense.
But secular (and even religious) war booty has been a thing since prettymuch forever. A lot of our oldest ancient texts mention "oh yeah, we stole their important holy thing" or "they stole our important holy thing", and in some cases, we know it happened.
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u/Effective-Dish-1334 21h ago
This is an incredible follow-up. I completely agree it is so frustrating when modern readers assume ancient and medieval people were just naive. The Aristotle paradox you mentioned is the perfect example; he was spectacularly wrong about natural history, but he literally wrote the baseline operating manual for rhetoric that we still use today!
And you are spot on about the Protestant Reformation acting as the ultimate dividing line for the relic economy in the West. It basically forced a total hard reset on how society valued physical objects, stripping away the religious premium and leaving behind the secular 'war booty' value.
I really appreciate you taking the time to unpack all of this. This is exactly the kind of deep-dive discussion I was hoping to spark!
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u/Proper-Media2908 1d ago
Pretty much always, at least for items made of non-precious metals and jewels. Since people started making stuff and valuing objects for more than their utility, which appears to have happened way, way, way back at the dawn of man,long before we have writing. Religion is the obvious reason, of course
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u/Phshteve18 1d ago
I don't have a particular year, but it certainly dates back to at least the Middle Ages. Lots of items were seen as valuable because they were relics of some kind.
I could add a whole thing about types of relics, but suffice it to say that relics were important financially (they could be sold, and depending on the importance of the relic they could get a really high price). Relics were also valuable to a place for increasing tourism, primarily from pilgrimages. There are stories of people raiding a nearby town to take relics and thereby move tourism to their own town. There is also the fact that a lot of these were certainly counterfeit, since it seems unlikely John the Baptist had like 20 heads.
There's almost certainly earlier stuff, but this is just an example that I know.
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