John Webber, the man who was given it as a child by his grandfather, never even saw the buyer, a man standing at the back who left the Dorchester auction room so quickly that local dealers refused to believe it had sold at all.

He was real enough, according to Garry Batt, a director of Duke auctioneers. The cup, which analysis suggests was made in the Middle East from a single sheet of gold about 2,300 years ago, has gone to a private buyer from Somerset, who wanted to add the enigmatic object to a family collection.

News of the cup went round the world, as have many of the previous discoveries of Guy Schwinge, who conducted the sale. He found in a spare bedroom the Fra Angelico panels which sold for a record £1.7m two years ago, and his regular valuation visits to West Country attics and cellars have turned up a Stubbs, a bundle of Picasso watercolours, and a Rembrandt drawing.

The auction house was walking on eggshells over the scrap dealer gold, however. "Please note the description," Schwinge said as he began the sale of three pieces from the shoebox, "and that goes for all these lots."

The catalogue, and the scientific report on which it was based, was larded with "probably", "suggested" and "appears to be". The cup, like the spoon showing lions chasing an antelope, which went for £5,000 - again the lowest estimate - is unique, which made it extraordinarily difficult to say definitively what it was.

The British Museum has in its collection - but too battered to display - a high relief silver cup with two heads, which slightly resembles the workmanship of the gold cup, and is also believed to be around 2,300 years old. But Webber cup, like the spoon and a gold disc which sold for £1,000 to the same buyer, seems to have vanished from history before being acquired by William Sparks, a Romany rag and bone man whose business prospered enough for him to leave his caravan for a house and scrapyard in Taunton. Webber only began to wonder about his grandfather gift when he moved house last year, and had to pack and unpack all his possessions. They turned out to be not brass, but gold - but the metal analysis is the only solid fact about the cup, a factor which undoubtedly put off some buyers.

He believes, as some experts have suggested, it was made in the Achaemenid empire centred on ancient Persia. He secretly hoped it might go to a museum in Iran, and that he might get a chance to deliver it himself. "She has a new home now though; she s going back to Somerset, and good luck to her," he said.

Source: Guardian