Reviews

054

The Lie Became Great: The Forgery of Ancient Near Eastern Cultures

Oscar White Muscarella
(Groningen: Styx Publications, 2000), 540 pp., $100

How widespread are forgeries in the Near Eastern antiquities market? The answer is “very,” according to this angry book by Oscar White Muscarella, a curator for more than 35 years at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The book is essentially a catalogue with plates of forged artifacts, plus a 22-page, aptly named “Introduction and Polemic.” Muscarella does cite a few statistics: Half of the Marlik-like vessels (Marlik is a site in northern Iran) on the market are estimated to be forgeries; and 40 percent of the 1,500 artifacts annually brought to Oxford University are forgeries. Around the world, about “25,000 forgeries of pre-Columbian art enter the bazaars each year.” And Yale’s Babylonian Collection, Muscarella writes, contains many “forgeries of tablets, seals, and bric-a-brac purchased in the early years of the century.”

The thrust of Muscarella’s text, however, is not so much to document how widespread forgeries are, but to indict those who support what he calls the “forgery culture.” This includes antiquities dealers, collectors, museums and scholars—and the editor of this magazine. Moreover, the museum people and scholars are for the most part not simply dupes but knowing participants. “Museum staff and scholars constitute a large component of the forgery culture … Museums continue with impunity to play their self-serving, self-protecting roles in denying or avoiding the problems.”

Muscarella describes case after case of near-criminal misfeasance. For example, a museum forbids a curator from exposing an artifact as a forgery. “Why do you care?” the curator was asked. Muscarella knows of several examples where museums have knowingly accepted forgeries from important financial supporters, thus allowing donors to take tax deductions based on the value of the object as genuine. Museums often refuse to remove forged objects from their exhibits. They will sometimes note in their object register certain artifacts, either purchased or donated to the museum, that no one is allowed to examine or photograph—for fear of detection. Thomas Hoving, the former director of Muscarella’s own museum, is described as having a “benign attitude toward forgeries.”

The world of academic scholarship is a partner in the conspiracy of silence. “A cuneiform scholar at a major university (with tenure, security, and a good salary) refused to answer questions about an inscription on a suspicious object.” His reason: He didn’t want to offend the dealer/collector who owned the piece or the fellow scholar who had published it as genuine. Scholars are scared. “They fear that [the object’s] owner, exhibitor, publisher, or fellow-travelling scholars will seek revenge—deny jobs, internships, grants, recommendations, or affection, to themselves or their students. They are, of course, realists, for they are right to fear reprisals.”

Scholars authenticate objects they know to be forgeries. Muscarella refers to, but does not name, “a particular scholar known to be available for such services,” who supposedly was paid off by a gift of antiquities.

He does, however, name several leading scholars, such as the distinguished Persian scholar Roman Ghirshman, one of whose articles Muscarella describes as “an overt sales catalog … and an attempt to deny the existence of forgeries.” Pierre Amiet, another distinguished Near Eastern scholar, is castigated for using “the standard tactic of … 055minimiz[ing] the importance of the ‘few’ forgeries in existence, arguing that they are a minor problem.”

Muscarella criticizes Egyptologist Robert Bianchi, a curator with the Florida International Museum in St. Petersburg, for advising antiquities collectors on how to go about the business of “intelligent collecting.”

Sometimes well-meaning scholars are simply unaware of the world about them. The highly praised study of Israeli scholar Ora Negbi, Cannanite Gods in Metal, for example, “is to be read with caution—it is innocent about forgeries.”

Muscarella cites a case involving the purchase of “blatant forgeries” by the Freer Gallery of Washington, D.C. A scholar then described the purchase in the normally reliable and rightly respected London Illustrated News, which, however, as a result, “unwittingly pimped” for the antiquities trade.

My own collusion is also unwitting, at least in Muscarella’s eyes. To dissuade people from collecting so as not to fall prey to the forger, I wrote the following in Archaeology Odyssey’s sister magazine Biblical Archaeology Review: “We wish to discourage collecting by alerting everyone to the dangers of being taken in by a forger … If you think you can outsmart the forger, you may be meant to be a collector. Otherwise, stay away.”^a According to Muscarella, this only “pretends to be a warning about forgeries—albeit written without any knowledge of the subject and its problems—but which is actually a self-serving defense of antiquity dealers and (more obliquely) collectors.” Yet he gives similar advice to his readers: “One should forage in the antiquity bazaars slowly and cautiously.”

Muscarella knows that his language 058is a bit too biting to be effective. “If considered to be satirical or angry,” he writes, “I only can state that even stronger language has been deleted from previous drafts of this manuscript.” Nevertheless, his book does highlight problems.

In Muscarella’s view, every object that has not been excavated in a scientific manner by a professional archaeologist is suspect. His catalogue of forgeries includes pieces in the Louvre, the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of New York, the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, the University Museum at the University of Pennsylvania, the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, the Israel Museum, the Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem, and the Cincinnati Art Museum (which contains an astonishing number of forgeries, at least according to 059Muscarella, for such a small museum).

Biblical Archaeology Review has also been taken in. While Muscarella concedes that he has “no knowledge and background to forgeries of biblical material,” he has been able to spot “an object manifestly created in modern times” that received “spectacular publicity” by its appearance on the cover of the May/June 1996 issue of the magazine—an inch-high plaque depicting the Binding of Isaac, from the collection of Shlomo Moussaieff of London and Israel. On the reverse side of the plaque are Aramaic letters that seem to make no sense. That is the key, says Muscarella, allowing him to tag the plaque a plain forgery. The very letters that form meaningless sequences to other scholars speak plainly to Muscarella: “This revealing evidence did not deter its publisher (H. Shanks), nor suggest to him the message easily read: keep away from me.”

While he is usually confident of his findings, Muscarella is also frequently unsure and in some cases has even changed his mind. He scoffs at the experts’ so-called “smell test.” One of the world’s greatest private collectors, George Ortiz, writes of objects that “speak to me.” Mocking Ortiz, Muscarella writes of jewelry in the Teheran Archaeological Museum that Muscarella believes to be forged: “It doesn’t speak to me,” Muscarella says. What, then, are Muscarella’s forgery tests? “The criteria for the charge are quite simple: its style, iconography, motif pattern, or manufacturing technique cannot be situated in ambiance and spirit to the known corpus of the culture to which it is attributed.”

Yet Muscarella also recognizes that “a genuine plundered object [obtained in an illicit excavation] is still an artifact made by ancient man.” In short, some plundered objects are genuine and must be evaluated for the contribution they can make. That is the dilemma. “If collecting stopped, plunder would stop,” says Muscarella. And of course there would be no market for forgeries either. He is undoubtedly right. But is this a viable aim? Isn’t it like saying, if liquor were not available, we wouldn’t have to contend with drunken drivers? Is it better to try to educate and regulate rather than to outlaw dealers and collectors? How should we deal with the problem?

Despite its intemperate tone, Muscarella’s book is a valuable one. It rightly calls on museums and scholars to re-evaluate their participation in the “forgery culture.” It should also scare the hell out of any current or prospective collector considering the purchase of an unprovenanced antiquity. And it might even induce some skepticism the next time you see a museum exhibit of ancient antiquities. Is he overdoing it? For this reader, who, as Muscarella says, is “without any knowledge of the subject or its problems,” it’s hard to tell.

The Lie Became Great: The Forgery of Ancient Near Eastern Cultures