Clumsy Forger Fools the Scholars—But Only for a Time - The BAS Library
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Home > Magazines > BAR > May/June 1984

Clumsy Forger Fools the Scholars—But Only for a Time

Fake inscriptions seriously debated in scholarly journals.

The forger has struck again—this time he managed to fool some of the world’s foremost scholars. Although at least some of his forgeries have now been discovered, the forger himself remains at large. And the problem of archaeological forgeries persists. The following may be just the tip of the iceberg. This chapter in the centuries-long story of archaeological forgeries began in 1966 when Jerusalem was still a divided city. West Jerusalem was Israeli; East Jerusalem and the Old City were in Jordanian hands. Early in the year, word circulated in East Jerusalem that a Jordanian entrepreneur from Jerusalem was […]

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Footnotes

1.

An ossuary is a rectangular box with a lid, usually hewn out of limestone and measuring about 20 inches long, 10 inches wide and 12 inches high, that was used as a depository for the secondary burial of the deceased’s bones.

2.

“An Announcement Published by the Department of Antiquities of Jordan and the Archaeologists Dr. William H. Brownlee and Dr. George E. Mendenhall Regarding the Decipherment of Carian Leather Manuscripts,” Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 15 (1970), pp. 39–40. Unless otherwise noted, all of the quotes attributed to George E. Mendenhall are from this article.

Endnotes

1.

W. H. Brownlee, G. E. Mendenhall, Y. Oweis, “Philistine Manuscripts from Palestine,” Kadmos 10 (1971), pp. 102–104.

2.

George E. Mendenhall, “The ‘Philistine’ Documents from the Hebron Area,” Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 16 (1971), p. 102.

3.

Ibid.

4.

Jonathan P. Siegal, “The Evolution of Two Hebrew Scripts,” BAR 05:03.

5.

E. Testa, “La mitica regenerazione della vita in un amuleto samaritano-cristiano del IV secolo,” Studium Biblicum Franciscanum Liber Annuus 23 (Jerusalem 1973), pp. 286–317.

6.

A. D. Crown, “Samaritan Majuscule Palaeography: Eleventh to Twentieth Century: I,” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 60/2 (Spring 1978), pp. 434–461, “Problems in Epigraphy and Palaeography: The Nature of the Evidence in Samaritan Sources,” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 62/1 (Autumn 1979), pp. 37–60.

7.

Reinhard Pummer, “New Evidence for Samaritan Christianity?” The Catholic Biblical Quarterly 41 (1979), p. 112.

8.

Pummer, p. 110.

9.

Pummer, pp. 109–110.