volume 2 - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian History Workshop

322 Forged Antiquities and Modern Imitations
send me on further missions to Egypt, without any
serious dislocation of my ordinary duties. Accordingly
I paid several further visits to Egypt, and when time
was limited and matters were urgent I have travelled
from London to the First Cataract and back again
to London in the space of three weeks. Between 1891
and 1913 I visited Eg57pt on the business of the Trustees
thirteen times.
I was most anxious to return to Mosul and its neighbourhood,
where many valuable manuscripts awaited
me, and to Baghdad and Hillah, from which places I
had received many letters from natives imploring me
to come quickly and make my selection from the many
tablets and cylinder-seals which they said they had
collected for me. But in fact there was little necessity
for me to go to Mesopotamia so far as Babylonian
antiquities were concerned, for the arrangements which
I had made with the dealers in Baghdad and the natives
of the Lower Euphrates were working satisfactorily,
and were then producing quite as large a supply of
tablets and other antiquities as the annual grants of
public money to the Trustees would enable them to
purchase for some years to come.
In the summer of 1892 the Trustees decided to increase
the various sections of the Egyptian Collection, and to
fill up the gaps in them as completely as possible. They
therefore instructed me to make arrangements to go
to Egypt from time to time to report on the collections
that were available for purchase, and to make selections
from them, and to follow up the enquiries concerning
certain manuscripts from the Nitrian Desert which
I had begun to make in previous years. It was important
that every collection should be examined before
it was dispatched to England, because many modern
imitations or forgeries of all sorts and kinds were already
on the market.^ It would have been, of course, quite
^ At that period spurious antiquities were practically unknown in
Mesopotamia, or at least there were no such imitations in the market
there as would deceive an experienced eye. It is true that soon after
1882 the natives at Kazimen began to make tolerably good casts