The reasons why these fakes are made and why so many people are taken in by them are as varied as the range of fake artifacts themselves. But often, as in the cases of the Etruscan Terracotta Warriors and the Crystal Skulls, the fakes are manufactured to sell and make a lot of money; it is as simple as that. This is also the case with the James Ossuary and with the many other fake biblical artifacts, like the Jehoash Inscription, for example. But many people are also taken in by fake biblical artifacts because they support their religious beliefs and are important tools in helping to prove the “truth” of the Bible. The Piltdown Man, on the other hand, may merely have been a practical joke that got out of hand, but it embarrassed many of the scientists of the day who believed the skull was the “missing link” between apes and humans. Preconceived beliefs, whether religious or otherwise, can often lead to the unquestioning acceptance of artifacts which appear to support that belief.
The problem of fake archaeological artifacts is not a new one, but it is becoming increasingly common as counterfeit ancient coins, jewelry, statues, weapons, and even mummies flood the marketplace and pollute the archaeological record. From sales on eBay for a few hundred dollars to million-dollar deals with some of the world’s biggest museums, archaeological forgery is a thriving business. Such fakes will continue to be manufactured and sold, often on the black market, as long as people are willing to buy artifacts without a secure provenance from dishonest antiquities dealers and private individuals whose only motivation is profit.
Saitaphernes’s Golden Tiara
The Scythians were a nomadic people of Iranian origin who inhabited the vast area of steppeland from what is now the Crimea, east of the Aral Sea in present-day Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan (once part of the former Soviet Union), from around the eighth century BC until the fourth century BC. The Scythians were renowned for their horsemanship and knowledge of horses, as well as for burying their dead in huge burial mounds known as kurgans. These kurgans have provided archaeologists with a wealth of artifacts that provide us with vital knowledge about the Scythians and their way of life, as well as their beliefs about death and the afterlife. Such burial goods include gold drinking cups, beautifully worked gold and silver jewelry, gold animal figures, bronze helmets and arrowheads, and iron swords sometimes with highly decorated gold-covered scabbards.
In the 19th century investigations of Scythian kurgans and their often-rich treasures resulted in a huge market for Scythian gold artifacts, and museums and individual collectors throughout Europe were on the lookout for more treasure from this area of the world. In 1830, at the site of Kul Oba, near Kerch in eastern Crimea (modern-day Ukraine), the stone burial vault of a Scythian king, his wife, and servant was discovered inside a kurgan. The fourth-century BC tomb contained an exquisite collection of grave goods, including a gold torque, a pair of gold pendant discs showing the head of the Greek goddess Athena, a gold bracelet ending in two sphinxes, and a unique round-sided goblet made of electrum and illustrated with Scythian male figures. Another incredible collection of Scythian objects, including a gold cover plate of a quiver showing scenes from the life of Achilles, a gold plaque in the form of the head of Dionysus, and an exquisite silver amphora with relief decoration of Scythians taming horses, came from the fourth-century BC Chertomlyk kurgan, northwest of the city of Nikopol (modern Ukraine), and was excavated in 1863. The majority of the finds from these kurgans eventually found their way to the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.
17.1. The “Saitaphernes tiara.” Photo from La Nature journal, 1896. Courtesy of Wikipedia.
In 1895 a story appeared in a Vienna newspaper about peasants in Crimea making an extraordinary find but having to escape Russia in fear their discovery would be seized by the authorities. In Vienna in February 1896, a Russian grain merchant and part-time art dealer from Ochakov (now in the Ukraine), Schapschelle Hochmann, and his brother exhibited a collection of ancient gold jewelry and other gold work. The collection included an extraordinary tiara, which Hochmann said was found among the ruins of the former ancient Greek colony at Olbia on the Black Sea, near Odessa. The oval-shaped gold tiara was about 7 inches in height, and weighed just more than a pound. Its beautiful decoration was divided into bands, the lower of which showed scenes from Scythian life, while the upper band illustrated episodes from the Iliad, including the quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles over the captive princess Briseis. An inscription in Greek on the object stated that the tiara was a gift from “The Senate and People of Olbia to the Great Invincible Saitaphernes.” Saitaphernes was apparently a third-century BC Scythian king.
Hochmann attempted to sell his collection through Vienna agents Szymanski and Anton Vogel, to Vienna’s Imperial Court Museum, but although a number of collector’s who viewed the objects were convinced they were genuine, the museum’s director, Bruno Buchner, expressed severe doubts and declined to purchase them. The British Museum had also been offered the treasure by letter, but it, too, turned down the opportunity. In March 1896, Vogel and Szymanski took the objects to Paris to try to interest the Louvre in purchasing them. Two experts on ancient art, M.A. Kaempfen, director of the National Museums and of the Louvre, and M.E. Hron de Villefosse, keeper of the Greco-Roman Department of the Louvre, were called in to closely examine the artifacts. They both found the objects to be genuine and recommended that the Louvre purchase the tiara without hesitation, which it did soon after, along with an “antique” gold necklace and pendant, for the sum of 200,000 gold French francs (about $40,000). On April 1, 1896, the Louvre proudly put the Tiara of Saitaphernes (as it was now known) on display in its Antiquities Department. But soon questions began to be asked as to its origin.
The first to voice his doubts was Munich archaeologist Adolf Furtwangler, who commented on inconsistencies in the style and design of the tiara, as well as the apparent lack of aging on the object. Soon he would denounce the tiara as a poorly made forgery. Other experts, including a Professor Vesselovsky of the University of St. Petersburg, who believed the object a typical example of the modern forgeries coming from the Hochmanns’ shop in Ochakov, also expressed their serious doubts about the tiara. Despite the objections and much debate in the press, the Louvre stood firm in its belief that the object was genuine.
On March 11, 1903, a Montmartre artist who went under the name Rodolphe Elina (real name Henry Mayence) was charged with forging paintings by artist Henri Pilles. Mayence then sensationally claimed that he had also made the Tiara of Saitaphernes, a statement that soon hit the headlines all over the world. On March 23rd, newspaper Le Matin published a letter written by a resident of Paris, a Russian jeweler named Lifschiu. He stated that he had watched a close friend of his, a highly skilled goldsmith named Israel Ruchomovsky, work on the tiara, and that it had taken him eight months to complete the task in 1895–96, for which he was paid 2,000 rubles. When contacted in Odessa, Ruchomovsky stated that he had indeed produced the tiara and that it had been made for a person from Kertsch (now in eastern Crimea). To prove his assertion, Ruchomovsky traveled to Paris and informed the officials at the Louvre that he had been commissioned to make the tiara by the two Hochmann brothers, as a gift to a Russian archaeologist, but that they had not told him the true purpose of the tiara. When Ruchomovsky was to begin work on the artifact, Hochmann had sent him illustrated books to help him, one of which was Antiquités de la Russsie Méridionale (Antiquities of South Russia), published in 1891 and written by Tolstoy-Kondekof-Reinach. Another was the Bilder-Atlas zur Weltgeschichte (Picture Atlas of World History) by Ludwig Weisser, published in 1860.
Ruchomovsky also described how he made the tiara in three separate sections, which he had then soldered together, and explained precisely how he had faked the signs of damage and age. On examination of the tiara, the goldsmith’s statements were found to be accurate, but the Louvre still required conclusive proof that their prized object was a fake. So at the request of an independent parliamentary committee, Ruchomovsky was asked to reconstruct a part of t
he tiara in gold without the use of the original object as reference. Ruchomovsky completed the task and in doing so practically sealed the fate of the Tiara of Saitaphernes as a modern forgery. Hugely embarrassed at how easily their experts had been fooled, the Louvre removed the tiara from display and put it into storage. However, the tiara did see the light of day again in 1954 as part of the Louvre’s “Salon of Fakes” exhibit, and in 1997 it went out on loan to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, which was staging an exhibition about Ruchomovksy.
Meanwhile, the talents of the poor goldsmith from Odessa had aroused much interest in Paris, and Ruchomovsky was soon inundated with orders from French jewelers. He exhibited his work at the Paris Salon of decorative arts from 1904 to 1906, and was soon able to bring his family from Odessa to Paris, where he remained until his death in 1934. On November 24, 1998, Christies in Amsterdam auctioned an exquisite miniature gold human skeleton and silver gilt sarcophagus that had been crafted by Ruchomovsky between 1892 and 1901 in Odessa and that he had signed in several places. The estimate for the 3 1/2-inch-long item was $103,902-$155,852, though it was finally sold for an incredible $311,530. Perhaps Ruchomovsky would be amused that it is the Louvre that has been left with a rather different skeleton in its closet.
The Persian Princess
In November 2000, the international press announced the discovery of an ornately adorned 2,600-year-old female mummy in Pakistan. Dubbed the “Persian Princess,” the mummy wore a gold crown and face mask, and had a gold breastplate placed over her crossed arms bearing a cuneiform inscription identifying her as the daughter of renowned Persian king Xerxes I (519 BC–465 BC). The mummy had apparently been offered for sale on the antiquities black market for $50 million. However, after much publicity and lengthy investigations, doubts were cast on both the age of the mummy and its provenance. The most chilling conclusion of the examination of the princess mummy linked it to a brutal murder and a deeply disturbing side of international antiquity trafficking.
In mid-October 2001 Pakistani authorities received information about an Iranian resident of Karachi named Ali Aqbar, who had made a videotape of an ancient mummy he was trying to sell. After his arrest and interrogation Aqbar led the police to the house of local tribal chieftain, Sardar Wali Reeki, in the town of Quetta, in the southwestern province of Balochistan, near the Pakistani border with Afghanistan. Aqbar also told the police that Sardar Wali Reeki had other valuable artifacts stored in his house, suggesting that he was involved in the illegal antiquities trade. When the house was raided the police located the mummy, which Reeki claimed he had obtained from an Iranian named Sharif Shah Bakhi, who had discovered it some years before in the Kharan district of Balochistan province after an earthquake. Reeki admitted that he had been trying to sell the item on the antiquities black market for $50 million, but so far had only been offered $1.1 million. Both Reeki and Akbar were charged under Pakistan’s Antiquity Act, which carries a 10-year maximum jail sentence. However the supposed discoverer of the mummy, Sharif Shah Bakhi, was never found.
Despite the questionable circumstances surroundings the discovery, the mummy princess was an astounding find and was immediately taken to Pakistan’s National Museum in Karachi. The news of the Persian Princess spread quickly and at a preliminary press conference on October 26th, professor Ahmad Hasan Dani, an archaeologist at Islamabad’s Quaid-e-Azam University, stated that as mummies were not found in Pakistan or Iran it must have come from outside, probably from Egypt. Noting the fact that the mummy was wrapped in bandages in the Egyptian style, though the cuneiform inscription on the plate was in Persian, Hasan Dani suggested that she may have been an Egyptian princess who married a Persian prince.
Further examination of the mummy revealed that she had been placed on top of a layer of wax and honey, and was contained inside a stone coffin set in an elaborately carved wooden sarcophagus. The sarcophagus was decorated with an engraving of Ahura Mazda, the supreme Zoroastrian deity, as well as other Persian symbols associated with Xerxes. Initial examination of the mummy suggested that her name was Khor-ul-Gayan or Tundal Gayan, an 18-year-old Persian princess, possibly the daughter of Karoosh-ul-Kabir, the first ruler of Persia’s Khamam-ul-Nishiyan Dynasty, which was established around 600 BC. But the translation of the inscription on her breastplate was much more sensational, reading “I am the daughter of the great King Xerxes. Mazereka protect me. I am Rhodugune, I am.” Could the mummy be a little-known daughter of the great Persian king? Asma Ibrahim, the curator of the National Museum in Karachi, where the mummy was kept and examined, suggested the mummy may have been looted from a tomb in the Hamadan region of western Iran, though she was aware that there was no evidence that the Persians mummified their dead in the way the Egyptians did.
As more investigations were carried out into the Persian mummy a dispute broke out between Iran and Pakistan, not the most amiable of neighbors to begin with, about who owned the mummy. The Iranian Cultural Heritage Organization claimed that, as the mummy was a member of the Persian royal family, she should be returned to the land of her origin. Pakistan, meanwhile, stated that as she had been found in Balochistan she should remain where she was. Even the Taliban got in on the act, claiming she had in fact been discovered over the border in Afghanistan and therefore in its territory.
There was yet another strand to the already-complex story of the Persian mummy. In March 2001, Oscar White Muscarella, former curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and a specialist in the antique art and archaeology of the Near East, received four Polaroid photographs of a mummy in a wooden coffin. The sender of the photos was a New Jersey resident named Amanollah Riggi, who was acting on behalf of an anonymous antiquities dealer in Pakistan. Riggi also supplied Muscarella with a translation of a cuneiform inscription visible in the photos on the mummy’s gold breastplate. The inscription, Riggi informed Muscarella, which had been translated by a “cuneiform expert at a major American university,”1 stated that the mummy was the daughter of the fifth-century BC Persian King Xerxes. Riggi also said that the owners had a video showing the mummy that could be sent to New York if the Met was interested in purchasing the item.
Suspecting all was not right with the mummy and the inscription, Muscarella contacted the cuneiform expert who had translated the inscription and found out that, although the text did identify the mummy as the daughter of Xerxes, there had been another page of the analysis that Riggi had not shown him. This second part of the report identified various inconsistencies in the supposedly Old Persian text, which led the expert to doubt the genuineness of the inscription. Muscarella also had his own doubts about the authenticity of some of the carvings on the wooden coffin and decided to have nothing more to do with Riggi. But seven months later when Muscarella heard about the newly discovered Persian Princess, he knew that it must be the same mummy he had been shown photos of in March 2001. Through the U.S. publication Archaeology Magazine Muscarella’s findings about the mummy were sent on to the FBI, who passed them on to Interpol.
At the National Museum of Pakistan, Asma Ibrahim was carrying out a detailed examination of the Persian mummy. One of the first things she noticed while scrutinizing the text on the breastplate was that the name “Rhodugune” was in fact the later Greek version of the princess’s original Persian name, “Wardegauna.” Ibrahim was puzzled and could think of no logical explanation for the Persians using the Greek version of the princess’s name. Further examination revealed more textual mistakes in the inscription, and when Ibrahim discovered lead pencil marks on the coffin, which had obviously been made to guide the carvings, she became doubtful of the supposed ancient origin of the princess. The mummy was subsequently sent to the Agha Khan University Hospital for CAT and X-ray scans to determine more about its origins. These tests revealed that the organs had been removed from the body, as was normal in the ancient Egyptian mummification process, and the cavities filled with powder (which later proved to be baking soda and salt). However, the heart had also been remov
ed, a practice unknown in ancient Egypt. The tests also showed that the woman’s back was broken and, inexplicably if the body was ancient, some of her tendons and ligaments were still intact.
Now convinced the mummy had to be a fake, Ibrahim sent samples of the wooden coffin, the reed matting on which the mummy lay, the bandages, and resins off to the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin for radio carbon analysis. The results confirmed Ibrahim’s suspicions: The reed mat had only been made in the last 50 years. Furthermore, radiocarbon dating of the corpse itself, also carried out in Germany, revealed a date for the mummy of between 1994 and 1996. Ibrahim published her findings in an 11-page report on April 17, 2001. Her conclusions were that the so-called “Persian Princess” was in fact a modern woman, about 21–25 years old, who had died around 1996, possibly killed with a blunt instrument to the back of the head. Sometime later, further analysis of the mummy revealed that the bones showed signs of osteoporosis, indicating she was in fact a middle-aged woman, perhaps around 50 years old, who had dyed blonde hair, and who had suffered both a broken neck and a broken spine, either of which could have caused her death. Although it was not possible to tell if her injuries were the result of an accident or something more disturbing, the police opened a murder inquiry and apparently arrested a number of suspects in Balochistan. The woman’s face was reconstructed using computer software and revealed to be characteristic of inhabitants of the border region of Pakistan and Iran, though her identity was never traced, and nothing came of the murder inquiry.
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