From nauplion@charm.net Sun Dec 10 03:54:57 2000 Received: from mxu2.u.washington.edu (mxu2.u.washington.edu [140.142.32.9]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.05/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id DAA285036 for ; Sun, 10 Dec 2000 03:54:56 -0800 Received: from fellspt.charm.net (root@fellspt.charm.net [199.0.70.29]) by mxu2.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.02/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id DAA26695 for ; Sun, 10 Dec 2000 03:54:55 -0800 Received: from charm.net (coretel-116-142.charm.net [209.143.116.142]) by fellspt.charm.net (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id GAA13429 for ; Sun, 10 Dec 2000 06:54:52 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <3A336DA8.4236B96A@charm.net> Date: Sun, 10 Dec 2000 06:49:00 -0500 From: Diana Wright X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en]C-DIAL (Win95; U) X-Accept-Language: en,el,tr MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Classics Subject: From Today's Sunday Times Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit © The British Museum Fake antiquities litter top museums Peter Watson MORE than 1,000 fake antiquities have been exposed in the collections of the world's leading museums, including the British Museum and the Ashmolean in Oxford. Many of the fakes, which range from Assyrian bronzes to 4,000-year-old Sumerian figurines in lapis lazuli, have passed unsuspected through auction houses such as Sotheby's and Christie's. The forgeries, 1,250 in all, have been identified by the archeologist Oscar White Muscarella, a recognised authority on forgery who is on the staff of the ancient Near Eastern art department at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. More than 10 years in the making, his survey and catalogue of fakes, The Lie Became Great: The Forgery of Ancient Near Eastern Cultures, will be published in Holland tomorrow. < The catalogue is set to ignite controversy in the antiquities world because Muscarella claims that the large number of forgeries he has identified are the tip of the iceberg. Having excavated in Turkey and Iran, his expertise is concentrated in the ancient civilisations of the Middle East. He reports that of the objects sent to the Oxford Thermoluminescence Laboratory, set up specifically to determine the age of so-called ancient objects, 40% are fake; half the antiquities brought to Sotheby's to be sold are fake, and are turned away; that the art market is awash with "scores" of forged Sasanian (Persian, 3rd century AD) artefacts and "hundreds" of north Syrian cylinder seals, and that 25,000 forgeries of ancient art enter the market every year. He has used his knowledge of sites, stylistic mistakes in fakes and similarity with other forgeries to catalogue the 1,250 phoney exhibits in museums. Some of the fakes that Muscarella includes in his catalogue are already acknowledged as such by the museums concerned. But the vast majority are not and until now nobody had any idea how common fakes are in even the most respected museums, though Muscarella also identifies well-known dealers in London and New York who have traded in fakes, and attacks a number of eminent British, French and German scholars for their part in this traffic. Among British collections, Muscarella identifies 16 fakes in the British Museum, 21 in the Ashmolean and 12 in the Burrell Collection in Glasgow. The Louvre in Paris, says Muscarella, holds 37 fakes, including an Assyrian royal marble head that was used to promote the museum in the Paris Metro. The Metropolitan in New York has no fewer than 45 forgeries. These include a Cycladic stone figure of a harp player, dated to 2700BC, that until recently was on the cover of a brochure advertising the museum. Few museums are immune from Muscarella's investigations. In Europe alone he has identified fakes in the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge, and museums in Amsterdam, Berlin, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Geneva, Prague and Brussels. There are forgeries in the Smithsonian Institute in Washington and the museums of Boston and Los Angeles.Elsewhere fakes proliferate in Jerusalem, Tehran and Japan. He recognised one bronze bowl in Teheran as a copy of a similar item in his own museum. In another case he realised that a stone vessel offered for sale at auction in 1993 was a copy of an example excavated in Iraq and illustrated in a German archeological journal published as long ago as 1962. Muscarella claims that in some cases museum staff are well aware of which objects in their collections are fake but they keep quiet out of embarrassment, scholarly rivalry or a desire not to offend rich trustees who donated the items. He goes so far as to argue that there is in fact a "forgery culture" in the antiquities world. This is created by the heavy overlap between plundered antiquities and forged artefacts. By definition, plundered antiquities contain no provenance, no history of when and where they were discovered. This creates a clandestine world, says Muscarella, where corrupt dealers, scholars and museum officials collude to dupe the public and trustees alike. It also means that scholarship suffers and makes it much easier for fakes to pose as unprovenanced objects. Many curators of ancient art in museums are, he says, much less well educated than scholars in universities "and know and care little about scholarship, let alone archaeology". Muscarella identifies 24 categories of antiquities that are known only from unprovenanced sources and therefore, he claims, may be fake in their entirety. Among the forgeries he says he has found in the British Museum are a Median (6th to 7th-century BC Persian) plaque depicting a winged lion, framed by bands of gold, which is still on exhibition in the Iranian gallery, and a Sumerian statuette of a figure with a sheep-wool skirt on display in the Mesopotamia room. Dr John Curtis, the museum's curator for the ancient Near East, said the museum had concerns about the plaque but had given it the benefit of the doubt. He believed the Sumerian statuette was genuine. "I think it is true that historical models have sometimes been built using objects which are not authentic or where the exact provenance of them is not proven. There is a lesson to be learnt from that," he said. In the Ashmolean, the alleged fakes include a bronze Mesopotamian lion mask, a bronze belt from Luristan, in western Iran, showing heraldic, goat-like animals, allegedly dated to the first millennium BC, and a striped human-like form, dated as fifth millennium BC, supposedly from Hacilar, an ancient fortified settlement in Turkey. Roger Moorey, the museum's keeper of antiquities, said: "This is a crusade by Muscarella. There are forgeries in every museum. When we know there are forgeries we identify them as such. We never conceal the fact." The Lie Became Great: The Forgery of Ancient Near Eastern Cultures, by Oscar White Muscarella, is published tomorrow by Styx Publications, Groningen, Holland. ***************** photographs http://http://www.sunday-times.co.uk:80/news/pages/Sunday-Times/frontpage.html?2513194 .