THE grandson of a rag and bone man has stumbled upon golden treasure after finding out an ancient cup handed down to him could fetch up to £200,000 at auction.

John Webber, 70, was a child when his grand-father William Sparks gave him the golden cup as a present and told him to keep it safe.

For more than 60 years Mr Webber has kept the cup under his bed in a box and then rediscovered it when he moved house last year.

Now it is going under the hammer at Duke's auctioneers in Dorchester on June 5.

Mr Webber said: "I didn't even know it was gold.

"I'd always thought it was bronze, and it wasn't until I took it to the experts that I realised it was so rare."

Experts now believe the cup, carved from solid gold, is from the third or fourth century BC from the Achaemenid Empire which stretched from Iran to Libya.

The cup is less than six inches high and has two female faces on it looking in opposite directions with snake motifs on their foreheads. This design was common in Roman times and depicted the

Roman God Janus.

Mr Webber, from Taunton, said his grandfather probably picked up the cup when he was a scrap metal dealer in Taunton in the late 1930s.

He said: "During the war my father was killed and then our house was bombed so my mother and I moved to Taunton to be with the rest of the family.

"We were thought of as the poor relations, and I think that's why my grandfather gave me this as a gift.

"He was a shrewd guy and he wouldn't have passed it on to me if it was not going to be of significant value."

He added: "When I first took the cup to the British Museum I had a negative response because they simply had never seen anything like it. But this changed after the tests confirmed how old it actually is.

"I have had a call from an expert in America who worked in Afghanistan digging up gold and she said that this cup rivals anything ever found out there in the dig known as The Mountain of Gold."

The money from the sale will be distributed within Mr Webber's family of five children and six grandchildren.

Mr Webber said: "At my age there's nothing I now want so I will enjoy helping the family pay off their mortgages."

Deborah Doyle, a valuer at Duke's Auctioneers in Dorchester, said: "It is very rare for a piece to survive this long and we haven't ever sold anything like it.

"It could be very valuable indeed and even fetch up to £200,000, although a more realistic estimate would be between £50,000 and £100,000."

The cup will go under the hammer in a two-day sale starting on June 5 and international museum buyers are expected to bid amongst collectors.

Two further items handed down to Mr Webber will also go to the highest bidder including a gold spoon valued at £10,000 and an Ajax gold mount valued at up to £2,000.