Mass production of forgeries

30 November 2020

Today, every French scientific institution has a scientific integrity contact person (Référent·e Intégrité Scientifique) in charge of investigating scientific misconduct. This mainly concerns forgery and fabrication of data, or plagiarism. In archaeology and history, the fabrication of data can take the form of a text written on an artificially aged medium, in a language that is no longer used, with a writing system that is no longer in use either. These forgeries are made deliberately to deceive, not always by scholars themselves, but by others, for profit. 

A recent book on the history of forgeries in different writing cultures around the world shows that while this phenomenon existed in antiquity, it has enjoyed success since the Renaissance with travellers and discoverers of ancient societies[1]. The 19th and early 20th centuries were a golden age of forgery. Forged writings may now be hidden in collections of authentic inscriptions and manuscripts. Of course, the methods for detecting forgeries have continued to progress. But in new disciplines, such as Assyriology in the mid-19th century, where cuneiform characters were just beginning to be deciphered, the production of fake tablets flourished

Even before the very first excavations organised in Iraq under the direction of French and English diplomats in the mid-19th century, objects inscribed in cuneiform characters arrived in Europe. The first of these, a stele surmounted by divine symbols, was brought back by the botanist André Michaux and deposited in the Cabinet des Médailles at the Bibliothèque Nationale in 1786. Claudius James Rich (1787-1821), British Consul in Baghdad between 1808 and 1820, bought antiquities from the bazaars, including cuneiform tablets. Among his collection, now held by the British Museum, are the first modern forgeries of cuneiform. These were made by simply printing real texts on clay shaped into rectangular tablets. The signs, instead of appearing in 3D in negative, thus appear in positive and in mirror image. 

The cuneiform tablets written in Akkadian, a Semitic language, began to be deciphered in 1857. The fascination with this new Mesopotamian civilisation, which was gradually revealed, was evident in the increasing number of collectors. At the end of the 19th century, large quantities of cuneiform tablets discovered in the Near East were sent to Europe and the United States. At the same time, forgeries were on the increase. The technique then used consisted in creating moulds of the two sides of a real tablet, filling them with clay and then gluing the two parts together with fresh clay. The illusion is perfect for anyone who cannot read cuneiform characters. Specialists spot the problems forgers have had in joining the two halves of the tablets; they have either smoothed the clay or added imaginary signs. Sometimes they have glued two different halves of a tablet together, with the result that the text no longer makes sense, or they have glued the same side of a tablet twice.

The discovery in 2014 in the Çorum region of Anatolia of part of a lead mould of a Paleo-Assyrian tablet face confirmed this forgery technique. This mould was probably made at the end of the Ottoman Empire. In addition, more than twenty replicas of the same Paleo-Assyrian tablet have been recorded as having been produced using this technique.

Making casts of originals requires access to them. At the turn of the 20th century, large batches of cuneiform tablets were acquired by American collections in Philadelphia, New Haven, Chicago and New York, among which there were many fakes. It turned out that the originals were in the British Museum, where the Reading brothers were to produce forgeries for the museum. No doubt their production far exceeded the museum's needs, and they were able to make some money by selling forgeries with the complicity of Joseph Shemtob, an antiquities dealer in Baghdad who was the main supplier to collections and museums at the time.

Even today, fakes can be found on the antiquities market. An example is the contents of two trunks from Bahrain seized at London airport. Unfortunately this production corresponds to a demand, but museums are no longer fooled. As for Assyriologists, for the sake of ethical and responsible research, they should simply not buy antiquities.

[1] C. Michel and M. Friedrich (eds), Fakes and Forgeries of Written Artefacts. From Ancient Mesopotamia to Modern China, Studies for Manuscript Cultures 20, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020, 338 p. downloadable free of charge at: https://www.degruyter.com/view/title/590832