Revisiting Forgeries Through Old Photographs

022

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words, or at least a couple hundred.

The streets of 1870s Jerusalem were abuzz with news of the fantastic ancient objects being sold by Moses Shapira in his Christian Quarter Road antiquities shop. Since 1868, when the famous Mesha Stela (or Moabite Stone) was discovered in the land of Moab across the Jordan,^a Shapira’s shelves had been lined with hundreds of stone and clay figurines and vessels, including those pictured in this 1874 photograph, purportedly crafted by the Biblical Moabites.

At the time, the objects, many of which include stylized faces and raised lettering resembling the script of the Mesha Stela, were accepted by most, including many respected European scholars, as genuine cultic vessels of the lost Moabite civilization. Shapira claimed that some of the figures even depicted the kings of Israel and Judah. For the public and Bible scholars alike, the vessels—along with the Mesha Stela—were tangible proof of the Bible’s historical reliability at a time when the Bible was increasingly scrutinized and questioned by critical Biblical scholarship, especially in Germany. Major European institutions, including the Berlin Museum, paid Shapira thousands to acquire the vessels for their collections.

It was not long, however, before the vessels were shown to be forgeries.^b Charles Clermont-Ganneau, a French scholar and diplomat who helped acquire the Mesha Stela for the Louvre, immediately questioned their authenticity, noting that the vessels’ “inscriptions” were rather poor knockoffs of letters and words found in the stela and that the “ancient” Moabite ceramics were actually made from the same clays used by modern Jerusalem potters. He also interviewed Shapira’s Arab assistants and associates, some of whom described in precise detail how the forgeries were crafted.

Shapira never admitted his role in producing and selling the Moabite forgeries, although only a decade after this photograph was taken in his store, he took his own life in the wake of a separate scandal involving “ancient” Biblical documents he had crafted and then sold to the British Museum.^c

This 19th-century tale of forgery and deception is just one of the many fascinating stories that lie behind the scores of photographs recently made available by the London-based Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) on the photo-sharing Web site Flickr. The 162 black-and-white and photochrom prints posted by the PEF come from the Fund’s early archaeological and geographic surveys of Palestine, Transjordan, Lebanon and Syria, including exceptional photographs of Jerusalem landscapes and monuments. Each photograph also includes a brief description of the site or objects pictured and the context in which the picture was taken. (You can browse the PEF’s photos at www.flickr.com/photos/palestineexplorationfund.)

024

The PEF hopes that the photographs will stimulate both scholarly and public interest in the organization and its vast photographic archive of more than 30,000 images, several thousand of which have already been digitized. The PEF will likely post more pictures to Flickr in the near future, but the long-term goal is to make the entire digital collection available online through the organization’s Web site (www.pef.org.uk).

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words, or at least a couple hundred.