By Sara Brumfield

 

Interest in delineating between authentic and fake artifacts grew with the earliest discoveries of ancient lands and forgotten peoples. But as long as there has been an interest in ancient cultures, there have also been forgers ready to capitalize on enthusiasts and specialists alike.

By 1904, during the early period of cuneiform tablet collecting, J. Edgar Banks, a Mesopotamian explorer and tablet dealer, estimated that nearly 80% of tablets offered for sale in Baghdad were fakes. In 2016, Syria’s Director General for Antiquities and Museums reported that approximately 70% of seized artifacts in the country are fakes. And with the continuing conflict in the Middle East, there is no reason to believe that the proliferation of fake artifacts will subside.

Because cuneiform tablets can be relatively easy to make but relatively difficult to detect, there is a clear incentive for forgers to continue producing large quantities. The effects of this long tradition of forgery are already deeply rooted. Fake tablets have found their way into nearly every major collection and many small, private collections around the world.

Fake cuneiform tablets are nothing new; even in antiquity scribes tried to pass off their creations as something older. For example, the scribes who wrote what we call the Cruciform Monument (because of its defining “┼” shape) claimed to be writing in the Old Akkadian period (ca. 2350-2100 BCE). But in fact they were writing several centuries later, during the Old Babylonian period (ca. 2004-1595 BCE). The first Assyriologists to translate this ancient text believed the scribes. It wasn’t until additional Old Akkadian texts came to light that one scholar, I.J. Gelb, suggested that the Cruciform Monument was not what it claimed to be: “Without being able to put a finger on it, one gets the impression that there is something unusual about the inscription.”

Gelb’s insights highlight one of the enduring problems with identifying cuneiform fakes, whether from antiquity or modernity: authentication often relies on years of specialized training and finely honed instinctual observations about minute details. This need for an expert eye has been a major obstacle in identifying fake cuneiform tablets.

But why are fakes even important? They’re impostors in the historical record, misleading the academy and the public alike. Shouldn’t fakes just be ignored, discarded or destroyed? Why bother identifying them? These ideas stem from the notion that fake artifacts don’t represent history. But in fact they just represent a different history. A fake cuneiform tablet may not tell us authentic information about Mesopotamian society, economy or worldview, but it may help tell the story of a conflict zone, oppression and criminal organizations. Conflict makes smuggling across borders easier and drives demand for ancient tablets—both illicit and excavated. This increased demand for tablets thus promotes looting and forging. The cycle continues.

Mesopotamia was a land of water and clay, and the Mesopotamian world was built from these elements—their buildings, pottery and writing. Using reeds that grew along the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, ancient scribes impressed styli into wet clay, formed into a convenient writing surface in the palm of the hand. The materials are simple, but the writing system is not. The small size, ease and low cost of materials make cuneiform tablets appealing to forgers, and the small number of experts who can read cuneiform make forgeries hard to detect.

But there are some obvious cues that non-specialists can use to help flag cuneiform tablets as possible fakes. And, there are free online tools available to help familiarize you with cuneiform tablets. The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI) is an online repository for all cuneiform objects—real and fake—spanning the entire history of the writing system across all genres and locations. There are currently over 330,000 cuneiform records, many of which have images available.

Without training or context, studying a cuneiform tablet can be a daunting task. The surface is covered with clusters of wedges of different shapes and sizes, and even determining which way is up is a puzzle.

Fig. 1 A Cuneiform Tablet (Photo courtesy of the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative).

 

In fact, museums often display their cuneiform upside-down for this very reason. Through years of dedicated study, Assyriologists learn the rules governing wedge shape, orientation, placement and order for cuneiform signs. In a nutshell, the head of the wedge is on top with signs proceeding from left to right. This general rule can help orient a cuneiform tablet so that you can continue to assess its probable authenticity—or lack thereof.

Cuneiform tablets come in a variety of shapes and sizes, but most are small and rectangular and written on clay.

Fig. 2 Real cuneiform tablet showing correct orientation and layout.

 

A common forger’s mistake is making a rectangular tablet that is too thin, like a cell phone. Depending on the genre and time period, tablets can also be square, pillowy, round, lenticular, conical, cylindrical, prisms, even cruciform. Particularly important ancient inscriptions were often carved on stone, but these tend to be larger objects intended for display. You should be skeptical of small stone inscriptions, especially those appearing to be “regular” tablets.

Fig. 3 Stone tablet with nonsense signs and unconventional layout.

 

But, despite this variety, there are certain constants.

Many people assume that cuneiform tablets flipped from front to back like a page in a book. This assumption leads to orientation errors in modern fakes.

Fig. 4 Fake cuneiform tablet with incorrect orientation.

 

But the overwhelming majority of cuneiform tablets rotate top-to-bottom when moving from the front to the back of the tablet. By knowing which way is up (by the position of the wedge head), determining the rotation for tablets is much easier.

Writing systems change over time, like many elements of culture—language, style of dress, cuisine, music and artistic trends—and cuneiform is no exception. Just like the English writing system has changed since the eras of Beowulf, Chaucer and Shakespeare, cuneiform looks different depending on when it was written. Likewise, tablet shape changes as well, creating a complex correlation between the form and style of cuneiform signs and the shape and layout of the tablet. In some of the earliest periods of cuneiform writing, signs were contained in cases. But for most of Mesopotamian history, signs always hung from the top of the line (compare Figures 2 and 4). If you see signs unanchored to their top line (like in Figure 4), you should immediately be suspicious of the authenticity of the tablet.

To circumvent the complex composition of cuneiform signs, forgers have taken to creating fakes appearing to date from the earliest periods of cuneiform writing, when signs were still pictographic or tablets contained only simple numeric notation.

Fig. 5 Excavated cuneiform tablet from the earliest phases of writing.

 

These are more difficult to assess, but being aware that early styles of tablets are popular with forgers can help flag tablets for further analysis.

Requiring more specialized knowledge are a tablet’s sequence of signs, counting systems, spelling conventions, personal names, place names, year names and so on. It is often the conjunction of features that ascertains a tablet’s authenticity—or lack thereof. There are talented forgers familiar with the nuanced details of the cuneiform writing system and material culture, which is why it is important to open discussions about fakes and forgeries and share information across disciplines, institutions and organizations. Part of that effort is the goal of equipping museum and cultural heritage professionals with tools and resources to detect the large number of fake ancient Near Eastern artifacts already in collections.

There are untold numbers of fake cuneiform tablets in collections worldwide, but currently there are also robust markets for acquiring “new” fake tablets. Some tablets even come with forged documentation and certificates of authenticity. The purchase of antiquities has always carried risk, and today is no different. Research into this dark corner of antiquities is still growing, but analyses of fake cuneiform tablets are nearly non-existent. Hopefully, with increased collaboration and information sharing, we can gain new insights into the methods, pathways, motives and effects of forgers and fake tablets in order to curb the demand and production of faked ancient Near Eastern history.

 

Sara Brumfield has a Ph.D. in Near Eastern studies from UCLA. She is an independent researcher based in the Washington DC area and consults with various organizations to bring the world and culture of Mesopotamia to a popular audience.