Fake! The Many Facets of the Forger’s Art

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In a recent issue of BAR,^a London antiquities collector Shlomo Moussaieff bemoans the fact that collectors, among their other difficulties, are the constant prey of fakers. Moussaieff knows whereof he speaks. No serious collection of archaeological artifacts, public or private, has failed to “swallow” its share of fakes and forgeries.¹

For an exhibit called “Fakes and Forgeries” that I curated several years ago at the Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv,^b Mr. Moussaieff lent us two genuine silver Athenian tetradrachmas of the fifth century B.C.E., each of which bore deep chisel marks. These chisel marks point to the existence of counterfeiting even in ancient times and attest the efforts to detect it. The authenticity of the coins was tested by inflicting deep chisel cuts to make sure that they were solid silver and not silver-plated copper.

In his encyclopedic work on natural history, Pliny the Elder, the Roman savant of the first century C.E., warns his readers against fake precious stones.

Both the ancient coin counterfeiters and precious stone fakers were out to make money by deceiving and cheating people. By contrast, Roman copies of famous older Greek originals were created not to cheat the purchaser or fool the public but to satisfy a popular preference for certain art styles, and they were accepted for what they were. Similarly, in the second half of the 19th century, the glass industries of England, Germany and Venice imitated ancient glass. This kind of imitation, known as “historicism,” does not pretend to be ancient. Unfortunately, many of the 19th-century glass imitations were such close copies that they were later resold by dishonest dealers as genuine antiquities and were often acquired by collectors who believed them to be authentic. Thus the innocent copy acquired the status of a forgery.

In modern times, replicas are often made of ancient artifacts, both for study purposes and aesthetic purposes, to give people a feel for an artifact. United States law requires replicas, which are different from fakes and forgeries, to be marked with the letter r to indicate that they are replicas. Even though an expert would not be fooled by these replicas, the r prevents them from being foisted off on an unsuspecting purchaser.

Essentially, two methods enable experts to detect fakes and forgeries. Neither, however, is foolproof. The first is the use of modern technology to check the authenticity of an artifact. Radiography and optical and electron microscopy can reveal certain kinds of frauds, especially where the forger’s error is of a technological nature. Chemical analysis, X-ray fluorescence, thermoluminescence and radiocarbon dating can, within rather close limits, indicate the composition and age of the material from which the object is made. Metal forgeries can be identified by laboratory analysis of their composition and crafting methods.

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The second method is detecting errors in details of the forger’s work—in the shape of the letters, in the iconography, in the various other techniques employed to produce a fake.

But with all our knowledge and all our technological expertise, we can still sometimes be fooled. It is simply not always possible to establish with absolute certainty whether a specific item is an original ancient artifact or a forgery.

Gross forgeries are relatively easy for experts to detect. And in the past most of the forgeries were gross. The most famous example is the supposed Moabite pottery sold to the Berlin Museum—more than 1,700 vessels and figurines—in 1873 by Jerusalem antiquities dealer Moses Wilhelm Shapira. Shapira’s story is a saga in itself.^c Suffice it to say here that the supposedly ancient Biblical manuscripts that he tried to peddle to the British Museum and which were denounced as forgeries (he committed suicide as a result) have been defended by some scholars, especially since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, as possibly genuine.

One of the most industrious of the 19th-century forgers was a Jerusalemite named Selim al-Khouri. Selim was not without his talents. He helped French archaeologist Charles Clermont-Ganneau copy the famous Mesha Stele (which inspired a flood of late 19th-century fakes and forgeries) before it was broken into pieces by the local Arabs who discovered it.^d Selim would authenticate some of the fakes he was involved with by salting the area where they were said to have been discovered with similar fakes. Selim would then take authorities on ancient artifacts—in one instance, the German consul in Jerusalem, Baron von Münchhausen and his companion, the Swedish scholar Dr. H. Almquist—to the site. There they could dig up similar pottery with their own hands, thereby proving the authenticity of what they had been shown as well as what they had themselves dug up. On another occasion Selim tried to sell the sarcophagus of King David, replete with an inscription. Clermont-Ganneau was also offered the seal of King David and an inscription from the sarcophagus of Samson.

Whereas forgeries from the 19th century are now relatively easy to detect, modern forgeries are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Museums and collectors are still confronted with the dilemma of authenticity.

In my study of fakes and forgeries, I encountered some of the extraordinary means by which modern perpetrators seek to deceive unwary buyers. I saw artificially-aged glass that had been covered in places with an iridescent patina or white “weathering,” and greenish glass that had been artificially dulled. I saw glass vessels, supposedly of the first century C.E., that were made from molds made from original pieces. In one instance, the neck of an ancient bottle with authentic weathering was attached to a fake body; the lip at the top of the neck was then heated and reformed into a trefoil mouth. Often fake vessels were artificially coated with dirt to give the impression of age.

Sometimes a genuine ancient object would be doctored to increase the market price. In one example, a genuine first-century Roman cup was decorated with two pairs of fish and two crosses so that it would appear 067to be a Christian vessel. Fake oil lamps have been found that were made from genuine ancient molds. Sometimes decorations are added, such as a menorah or an erotic scene, to fetch a better price on the market. The same effect can be obtained by making a modern mold from an ancient exemplar. Another technique involves putting together several ancient fragments to form what appears to be a complete artifact. The “reconstruction” is camouflaged and sold not only as genuine but as complete.

Even cuneiform tablets have been faked. Ernest Budge, a cuneiform expert at the British Museum, wrote about faked cuneiform tablets as early as 1883.

The Iranian artifacts known as Luristan bronzes have been widely faked. Most of the Luristan material that arrived in Europe came from unorganized excavations or from licensed excavations organized by antique dealers. Only a small quantity of the material was excavated in organized archaeological digs, and even these lacked suitable documentation on the origin of the artifacts and their archaeological contexts. The brisk trade in these bronzes led to a boom in the production of imitations and forgeries. With fair regularity, a piece would appear on the market that was forged—or at least aroused suspicion—and would then be followed by a long line of articles of the same type. The first in the series would be “authenticated” in a scientific paper written by an art investigator; afterwards, others would obtain validity as parallels to the original. Forgeries replicated forgeries because of the ease with which they could be created.

Over the past hundred years, in order to satisfy the growing demand by numismatists for ancient coins, many have been counterfeited. Most fakes have been cast rather than stamped and are therefore readily exposed by experts. Although the casts are made in molds prepared from original coins, many of those offered for sale to tourists are not even cast of the proper material. Coins that were originally silver, for example, are cast by modern counterfeiters in bronze.

In addition to those made by casting, more sophisticated counterfeits are produced by ancient stamping methods. A well-known 19th-century counterfeiter, Karl Wilhelm Becker, made his own punches and with them produced coins so nearly perfect that only an expert in the field of numismatics could detect them as counterfeit.

It would be difficult to find any kind of ancient artifact that has not been faked. Those who are not suitably warned are the fakers’ legitimate prey.

In a recent issue of BAR,a London antiquities collector Shlomo Moussaieff bemoans the fact that collectors, among their other difficulties, are the constant prey of fakers. Moussaieff knows whereof he speaks. No serious collection of archaeological artifacts, public or private, has failed to “swallow” its share of fakes and forgeries.1 For an exhibit called “Fakes and Forgeries” that I curated several years ago at the Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv,b Mr. Moussaieff lent us two genuine silver Athenian tetradrachmas of the fifth century B.C.E., each of which bore deep chisel marks. These chisel marks point to the […]