A FORGED TOMB
I AM indebted to Dr. G. A. Reisner for the following story and
incidents, and for others which are incorporated in the earlier chapters
of this book.
“It was in the summer of 1902, I think, that a couple of young men from
the west bank of the Nile at Thebes visited a dealer in antiquities
whose shop is in Luxor. After general conversation, coffee drinking, and
so forth, they finally asked the proprietor if he wished to buy any
antiquities.
“‘Certainly,’ he said, ‘if they are genuine.’
“‘Will you believe they are genuine if you see them in position in the
tomb in which they were found?’ they asked.
“‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘Have you got a tomb?’
“They said they had, and made arrangements to take him to it at
midnight, two or three nights later.
“When the night and the hour came, they met at the appointed place and
proceeded towards the tomb. On the road there was a fierce whispered
alarm that the guards were coming, and the party scattered in all
directions. The next night a second appointment was made, and this time
the party reached the entrance to the tomb. The doorway was blocked up,
except for a small hole, and sealed with what seemed to be ancient
mud-plaster. They tore down this block and entered the tomb, a large
rock-cut chamber, literally filled with antiquities—stelæ, ushebti,
coffins, vases, and other objects, apparently covered with the dust of
ages.
[Illustration: PLATE XIV. A PIECE OF MUMMY CASE. This is new wood made
up to represent a part of a genuine mummy case.]
“The party then adjourned to Luxor to discuss the price. The dealer
finally bought the lot for something like £600, and was obliged to raise
a mortgage on some property in order to get the money. After great
difficulties in avoiding the guards, the objects were finally
transferred from the tomb to the dealer’s house in Luxor. The summer
passed in pleasant dreams of winter profits, and finally the first
Museum buyer arrived on the scene. The dealer selected a stone from the
purchased lot, and carried it round to the house of a friend where the
Egyptologist happened to be engaged in negotiations for the purchase of
some antiquities. The dealer called his friend to the door, and asked
him to show the stelæ to the buyer. His friend smiled and said, ‘It is a
forgery.’
“The dealer laughed in derision, and insisted on the stone being shown
to the expert, who took one look at it and said, ‘Rank forgery.’
“The dealer, who had found this in what seemed to be an untouched tomb,
now became thoroughly alarmed. At his request, his friend and the
Egyptologist went to his house to inspect all the objects from the tomb.
They were all forgeries, and the dealer had been swindled out of his
£600 by a cleverly-planned trick of the west bank forgers.”
* * * * *
The Egyptians who are engaged in the making of spurious antiquities are
now specialising. One man in Luxor has perfected the manufacture of
glazed or faience vessels. Another at Qeneh has developed the cutting
and inscription of stone scarabs. At Aboutig a forger makes woodwork and
carved ivories, and somewhere in Egypt they are making stone vessels of
all periods, apparently on a steam lathe, but copying the ancient forms
with great success. A dealer in Cairo once showed me an enormous head of
Amenemhat III., which he said was offered to him as coming from Tanis.
This must have been the work of European stone-masons. It was cut from a
single large boulder of sandstone, an exact copy of the existing
portraits of that king, but the cutting had been done with modern
stone-masons’ tools, the marks of which were plainly visible, even
without a glass.
“On another occasion,” Dr. Reisner tells us, “I was once looking through
the stock of a dealer, now dead. Suddenly I caught sight in the back of
a drawer of what appeared to be a Babylonian object. The dealer, who
happened to know that I have some knowledge of Babylonian antiquities,
was very reluctant to show me the object, protesting openly that it was
a forgery. I persuaded him, however, and he produced a dozen or more
very beautifully made Babylonian sculptures, but all perfectly
impossible. He said that he received them from a Persian, an agent who
came through Cairo every year, and left him a certain number of pieces
to sell on commission. I tried to buy one of these pieces, offering even
as high as £5 for it, against the £40 he demanded, but he refused. When
I came back in the spring, he told me with a grin that he had sold them
all at his own price to various travellers.
“I afterwards learned the forger’s name, and that he lived in Baghdad,
from an excavator who had been working in Mesopotamia. This man also
forged cuneiform tablets, and I have seen examples of his work in other
shops in Cairo besides the one I have mentioned. He first began his
forgery of the cuneiform tablets by making moulds of the two sides,
pressing clay into the moulds and sticking the two halves together
before baking. These forgeries were always discernible by the
shallowness of the little wedges of which the writing is composed. This
seems to have been pointed out to him, for after a time he began going
over these tablets with a pointed stick before baking, and thus
deepening the wedges. Finally, with the practice thus gained, he even
went so far as to copy tablets freehand; and I know of at least one
large tablet in a European museum which he made freehand without any
tablet to copy from. It has all the appearance of one of the great
tablets from the temple at Telloh, but the writing has no meaning.”
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