volume 2 - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian History Workshop

in Mesopotamia and Egypt. 323
easy to send all forgeries back to the dealers in Egypt,
but if that method had been followed, the dealers would
have suffered considerable pecuniary loss, and it was
very important not to discourage them when they were
ready and wishful to send their antiquities direct to
the Museum. Antiquities (and even modern imitations,
if values had been assigned to them), when imported
into Egypt had to pay an 8 per cent, ad valorem duty,
and all goods returned to Egypt, of whatever class,
were liable to this duty in common with ordinary imports.
It was open to a dealer to declare that a modem
imitation which had been returned to him was worthless,
and to allow the Customs to sell it for what it would
fetch, but such a proceeding would injure his reputation.
There was also another serious risk for the dealer,
i.e., confiscation by the Service of Antiquities, followed
by prosecutions for illegal possession. In short, no
dealer would send his antiquities to England if there
was the least chance of any of them being returned to
him.
In the early "nineties" few people in England who
had not been in Egypt had the least idea of the skill
which some of the natives had acquired in the forging
of antiquities, and it may not be out of place to add here
a few words on the subject. Some of the forgeries were
to all appearance—of small contract tablets. But cis they did not
understand the art of casting " in the round " they could not reproduce
the inscriptions on the rounded edges of the originals ; and
therefore their casts lacked the kings' names and the dates and the
ends of the lines that often ran over the right-hand edges of the
originals. The plan they followed was to cast each side of the tablet
separately, and then to stick the obverse and the reverse together,
and " make up " the edges with clay ; but the place where they joined
could be easUy detected, and on the insertion of a penknife the two
sections came apart, as I pointed out in a short letter to the Athenaeum
many years ago. The re-cutting of ancient cylinder-seals and the
forging of inscriptions in hard stone did not begin tUl some years
later. In 1891 I was shown in Baghdad several forged inscriptions on
clay, which had been made by a youth in the French School there.
He used a small, blunt, three-sided piece of hard wood to form the
wedges of the clay, and with practice would have become an expert
scribe.
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