Clumsy Forger Fools the Scholars—But Only for a Time

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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 offering for sale eight tightly rolled parchment manuscripts that might be even older than the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Among those contacted was the prominent American scholar, Dr. William H. Brownlee of Claremont Graduate School, who had come to Jerusalem that summer to participate in the excavations at Biblical Shechem. Brownlee was well-known in the community of scholars as an expert on the Dead Sea Scrolls. He was among the first to identify and authenticate the scrolls in 1948 and had participated in some of the early negotiations for their acquisition. He was a likely prospect as a buyer for the latest manuscripts to come on the market.

Brownlee was excited about examining the writing, but because the manuscripts were tightly rolled, it was impossible to see what was on the inside. Moreover, the manuscripts were extremely dry and brittle. According to the seller, they had come from an ancient site somewhere in the Hebron area. This area is known for its ancient tombs, and these manuscripts were supposedly found in a stone chest inside a tomb, perhaps in a sarcophagus or ossuary.^a Nothing else about the manuscripts was known.

After some negotiations, Brownlee struck a deal. On June 19, 1966, he purchased the eight tiny manuscripts for the Jordanian Department of Antiquities and notified Yacoub Oweis, then Director General of the Department.

Preparing to examine the scrolls, Brownlee promptly welcomed the collaboration of another leading American Bible scholar and linguist, Dr. George E. Mendenhall of the University of Michigan, who was then serving as Director of the Jerusalem branch of the American Schools of Oriental Research. Together the two men cleaned the outside of the manuscripts as best they could and then subjected them to five days of intensive humidification. Only then were they able to unroll the manuscripts and prepare them for both regular and infrared photography. With these photographs, plus the manuscripts themselves, scholars could subject the inscriptions to proper scholarly scrutiny.

The first problem was to date the manuscripts. Without any archaeological context, the inscriptions had to be dated on what scholars call paleographic grounds—according to the shapes and forms of the letters. Other clues could be obtained from spellings, word forms and linguistic characteristics. Mendenhall found important 068similarities between the writing system used in these manuscripts and writing systems used in datable inscriptions from other regions. The writing systems were, in Mendenhall’s words, “definitely related.”^b

On this basis, Mendenhall dated the inscriptions between the early ninth century and the late seventh century B.C.! Tremors reverberated through the scholarly world.

What about the language in which these inscriptions—600 or 700 years older than the Dead Sea Scrolls—were written? This proved to be at once more complicated and more startling.

Since Mendenhall was unable to read the manuscripts, he had to rely, once again, on the writing system to determine the likely language. Fortunately, the documents—made from camelskin parchment—were in a state of “remarkable preservation,” no doubt as a result of having been kept in a dry container for more than 2,500 years. (When purchased, they had been stashed in aromatic powdered thyme.)

From the fact that there were about 30 signs, the inscriptions had to be in an alphabetic script, Mendenhall concluded. Although Mendenhall found many of the signs were similar to ancient Hebrew and Phoenician letters, he decided the inscriptions themselves “[could] not be a Semitic language.”

Based on the writing system of the camelskin parchments, Mendenhall found a relationship to the poorly known languages of the southern part of ancient Anatolia (present-day Turkey)—Carian, Lycian, and Lydian. But Mendenhall also found “striking similarities to inscriptions which have been found in Crete, Sicily and Italy.” The relationship to the most archaic Etruscan was “particularly striking.” The writing was also closely related to the most archaic Greek.

Mendenhall concluded that the writing system had been “recently borrowed from Phoenician and adapted to a foreign language with a radically different phonetic structure.”

Mendenhall could find only one candidate for a people who met all the characteristics of this writing and who had been subjected to all these influences—the Philistines! “It is entirely possible,” Mendenhall wrote, “that, after several generations of archaeological work, we finally have recovered some documents of the Philistine language.”

The letter shapes stood “in a mediating position between the most ancient Phoenician and archaic Greek.”¹ This fit into Philistine history perfectly.

If these documents were indeed Philistine, their discovery was astounding, for almost nothing is known about the Philistine language—despite the fact that a number of Philistine sites have been excavated and a great deal is known about their religion and religious architecture, their homes, their pottery, their artistic motifs and their history. (See“What We Know About the Philistines,” BAR 08:04 by Trude Dothan, and “Exploring 069Philistine Origins on the Island of Cyprus,” BAR 10:02, by Vassos Karageorghis.) However, not a single inscription of any length thus far discovered can definitely be designated as Philistine.

Finally, these manuscripts were important because they helped explain certain Biblical passages—even before the inscriptions were deciphered. Three of the eight manuscripts were incised with a sharp instrument directly onto the parchment, instead of being written in ink (as the other five were). This was a “new kind of ancient manuscript,” said Mendenhall, an engraving on parchment as it were. Passages in the Bible (such as Isaiah 30:8 and Habakkuk 2:2) could now be understood to refer to this kind of engraving on parchment.

It all seemed almost too good to be true. Some scholars quietly suggested the possibility of a forgery. Mendenhall bridled: “Those who perpetuate the rumors have the obligation of common decency to produce the evidence concerning those alleged forgeries, if in fact they do exist, so that they may be compared with these documents under examination,” Mendenhall wrote.²

At a meeting of scholars in Atlanta in 1911, Brownlee presented a paper on the documents. In the midst of his presentation, Professor Frank Moore Cross of Harvard University, one of the world’s leading Semitic paleographers, took the unusual step of interrupting the speaker. Looking at the projected slide of one of the manuscripts, Cross immediately recognized words from one of the most 070famous ancient Hebrew inscriptions ever discovered, the so-called Siloam Inscription, an authentic inscription that a forger had apparently copied. The document on the screen must be a forgery, Cross announced. Brownlee accepted this judgment and had nothing more to do with the documents. In Mendenhall’s words, “Brownlee dropped them like a hot potato.” (Brownlee died July 16, 1983.)

Mendenhall, however, continued to defend the authenticity of the manuscripts. He arranged for a radiocarbon (carbon 14) test to be conducted on tiny pieces of the camelskin parchment to determine its date scientifically. The test determined that the parchment was modern. Undeterred, Mendenhall concluded that these tests were “meaningless” because the manuscripts could have been contaminated by modern organic material after they were uncovered and before they came into scholarly hands. “Months of handling, exposure to fallout, and contamination took place before the test,” said Mendenhall.³

Recently, an Israeli scholar and epigraphist, Joseph Naveh, independently concluded, as had Frank Cross, that a modern forger had copied the Siloam Inscription in at least one of the supposedly Philistine manuscripts. (Photographs of only two manuscripts were available to Naveh.) Naveh demonstrated precisely how the forger used an authentic Hebrew inscription—the Siloam Inscription—in his forgery. The forger had simply copied from left to right instead of from right to left parts of the Siloam Inscription. The forger wasn’t even good at copying the letters, said Naveh. Naveh called the forger’s copying “clumsy.”

The Siloam Inscription is named after the Siloam Tunnel in Jerusalem where it was discovered in 1880. The Siloam Tunnel, or Hezekiah’s Tunnel as it is more commonly known today, was dug shortly before 701 B.C. by King Hezekiah of Judah to protect Jerusalem’s water supply during the expected Assyrian siege of the city (see 2 Chronicles 32:1–3, 30; cf. 2 Kings 20:20). By means of the tunnel, a camouflaged supply of spring water outside the city wall flowed underground via the tunnel to a reservoir inside the city. As the Bible recounts (Isaiah 37), Jerusalem withstood the Assyrian siege, probably as a result of Hezekiah’s foresight in digging the 1,750-foot tunnel.

The S-shaped tunnel was dug by two teams of workers who started from opposite ends and somehow managed to meet in the middle, despite the tunnel’s circuitous route. Near the southern end of the tunnel, a commemorative inscription in beautifully shaped pre-Exilic Hebrew letters⁴ was carved into the rock side of the tunnel. Shortly after the Siloam Inscription’s discovery in June 1880, Turkish archaeologists chiseled it out of the rock, cracking it in the process. It now resides in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum in Turkey, because Jerusalem was then part of the Ottoman Empire.

The Siloam Inscription describes the remarkable meeting of the two teams of tunnelers as they found each other underground:

“[A]nd this is the story of the piercing through. While [the stonecutters were swinging their] axes, each towards his fellow, and while there were yet three cubits to be pierced through, [there was heard] the voice of a man calling to his fellow, for there was a crevice [?] on the right … and on the day of the piercing through, the stonecutters struck through each to meet his fellow, axe against axe. Then ran the water from the spring to the pool for twelve hundred cubits, and a hundred cubits was the height of the rock above the head of the stonecutters.”

This inscription is of course written from right to left, as Hebrew was written at the time and is still written. The forger of the “Philistine” manuscripts, as Cross and Naveh discovered, simply copied parts of the Siloam Inscription, but from left to right as English is written. The forger copied the first six lines of the Siloam Inscription in the first ten lines of the “Philistine” inscription. The “Philistine” inscription has a total of 13 lines. In the last three lines the forger repeated parts of the beginning of the Siloam Inscription. Because the length of the lines in the Siloam Inscription is different from that of the “Philistine” manuscripts (the lines are longer in the Siloam Inscription), copying the Siloam Inscription from left to right produced distortions in the letter order.

To illustrate how this occurred, read the following legend from right to left (as the Hebrew in the Siloam Inscription is written).

THGIR MORF SIHT GNIDAER ERA UOY FI