volume 2 - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian History Workshop

Forged Royal and Funerary Scarabs. 325
scarabs was made of the beautiful greenish-blue, or
bluish-green, glaze which he obtained from pounding
up the genuine glazed bugle beads from the coverings
of mummies. As one English archaeologist supplied him
with a carefully written list of the cartouches of the
principal Egyptian kings, and another sent to him
from England a small portable furnace and crucibles,
he was able to supply tourists with good selections of
" royal scarabs " for several years.
When he died, some years ago, a friend came to me
on behalf of his widow, and asked me what she should
do with her husband's collection of scarabs and other
antiquities. I went with him and looked at them,
and found among them several genuine scarabs which
had served as models for him, several hundreds of " royal
scarabs," some finished, but many unfinished, several
moulds (a few of them ancient) for making casts of
paste scarabs, moulds for making casts of rings in gold,
and about half a dozen large green basalt scarabs, on
which the deceased had been trying to cut the hieroglyphic
text of Chapter XXXB. of the Book of the
Dead. Most interesting of all was a series of large
green glazed steatite scarabs, with their bases inscribed
and covered with gold leaf. Each was mounted in a
framework of gilded copper, upon which was fastened a
ring, to which a chain could be attached. When we
looked at the inscriptions on the bases of the scarabs
we found that they consisted of the prenomens, nomens
and titles of all the great kings of the XVIIIth and
XlXth dynasties. Among them I saw duplicates of
a scarab of Thothmes III in the British Museum (No.
18,190) and of a scarab of somewhat similar shape
and form at Cambridge, and I am now convinced that
both of these are forgeries. Of course, it was out of
the question to buy any of these for the British Museum,
though they would have been very valuable as specimens
of the art of the forger of Egyptian antiquities, and it
was equally impossible to allow these clever forgeries
to get into the hands of the dealers. I therefore went
and talked the matter over with Maspero, who, with