Requiem for a Forger

Chanan Tigay, The Lost Book of Moses: The Hunt for the World’s Oldest Bible (New York: Ecco/HarperCollins, 2016)

The tone for Chanan Tigay’s book is set by the cover: a colorized photograph of Jaffa Gate (Bab al-Khalil) of Jerusalem’s Old City in the late 19th century. Looking back at the camera, while the other figures in front of the gate go about their business, is Moses Shapira, the Jerusalem antiquities dealer and Tigay’s main character. Except there is one problem: Shapira did not appear in the original picture. Our cover photo is a fake.

Inside the covers we find the lengthy tale of the “world’s oldest Bible” in Tigay’s subtitle – not a complete Bible, but merely the purported original version of the book of Deuteronomy, with which Shapira showed up in London in summer 1883. Shapira asked the British Museum for a million pounds to acquire his Deuteronomy strips; instead, they were declared a forgery, with Shapira leaving the country in disgrace and committing suicide six months later. The manuscript itself was lost within a few years of the incident, but has been the subject of recurring interest since. This notorious incident has been retold many times, in both scholarly and popular versions, but journalist Tigay combines the tools of investigative reporting with some recent scholarship in this account of his attempt to find the strips and determine whether they were authentic.

Tigay’s version is a popular version, and it can be difficult to review a popular book as a scholar. The criteria to judge by and even the goals of popular books vs scholarship can be quite different. But this book, however broad an audience it’s reaching for, is still a contribution to our knowledge of the past – and it is this contribution in which I’m most interested. So let’s consider each aspect separately.

As a popular book: The Lost Book of Moses makes for fairly quick reading. It is engaging, other than a tendency to provide unnecessary or unwanted details. (These include several odd passages focusing on his and others’ undergarments or bodies.) In the end, though, the book is simply anti-climactic: (spoiler) Tigay doesn’t find the manuscript he spent four years looking for, and on top of this he concludes that it’s a forgery anyway.

As a work of scholarship: It is well-researched – both in terms of extensive investigative reporting and library research. Tigay uses most of the known (and some previously unknown) sources that are relevant to the strips. I’m glad that I read this book: I learned several things about Shapira and the Deuteronomy strips, even as someone who has researched and written on them before.

There are many minor errors, most of which do not affect the main conclusions or the course of the narrative. But there is one major exception to this: a cluster of errors around the influential Orientalist scholar Charles Clermont-Ganneau.

Clermont-Ganneau makes two climactic appearances in Shapira’s life, and for each one Tigay has badly botched the sequence of events: Clermont-Ganneau’s announcement of Shapira’s Moabite pottery (the infamous “Moabitica”) as a forgery in 1873-74, and his announcement of the Shapira strips as a forgery a decade later. In both cases the effect is to make Ganneau appear to have rushed ideas into print, without care or “scooping” other scholars, or even “poison[ing] the well” (p. 250). In both cases Tigay cites and even quotes from the documents that provide the correct timeline and prove Ganneau mostly innocent of the charges.

Tigay also presents a series of cases in which he charges that Ganneau stole ideas or discoveries from others. It is true that Ganneau emphasized his role in the recovery of the Moabite Stone and neglected to mention F.A. Klein, the missionary who was the first Westerner to see it, in his publications on the stele. But in general the evidence for theft in these cases is flimsy or even nonexistent.

One claim deserves special attention: that Ganneau stole credit for the discovery of the first Gezer boundary inscription from Charles Tyrwhitt Drake, a scholar with the Palestine Exploration Fund’s Survey of Western Palestine. This is a remarkable claim, since that discovery (and its connection with the identification of Tell Jezar as Gezer) is one of the most important and famous of Ganneau’s achievements and is universally credited to him. Tigay’s sole source here is John Moscrop’s Measuring Jerusalem, which itself has a large number of errors (as noted in Rachel Hallote’s review in Religious Studies Review, 2004.) Moscrop in turn relies on a letter of Claude Conder, but the actual text of that letter – contra Moscrop and Tigay – makes clear that this claim of theft is merely a false rumor spread by Ganneau’s enemies in Jerusalem, and Conder declared it baseless.

These cases then set up a final charge, that Ganneau stole his proof for revealing the Shapira strips as a forgery from Christian Ginsburg. Here, the only evidence, besides the similarities of Ganneau’s and Ginsburg’s points – which Ganneau put into print before Ginsburg – is the recollection of Ginsburg’s son thirty years later. Looking at each of these charges on their own, there is little to no supporting evidence; so Tigay must present them together in order to suggest a pattern of bad behavior (to poison the well?).

Ironically, for someone employed in the French consulate, Ganneau was a remarkably undiplomatic person. He was apparently a difficult man to get along with. He emphasized his own role in discoveries and scholarship repeatedly, deemphasizing or ignoring the roles of others. He made many enemies. But Ganneau also had friends among scholars. And almost everyone respected him immensely for his abilities and his work. The PEF tried for two years to hire him before they were successful, and even after he resigned his commission they still promoted him publicly and published new articles of his for decades.

So, why does Tigay consistently make these errors?

Accounts of the Shapira affair typically present it as a contest between Shapira and Ginsburg (see Fred Reiner’s excellent contribution), or Shapira and Clermont-Ganneau, with the latter as Shapira’s long-term nemesis (from the Moabite pottery days). Tigay adopts this frame, but then does something astonishing: he makes the forger Shapira his hero.

Shapira is not presented in a wholly positive light – we see his sometime neglect of his family; his apparent affair – but Clermont-Ganneau’s presentation is almost completely negative, except for brief references to his skill and knowledge as a scholar. This presentation of Ganneau includes the most ungenerous readings, and even misreadings, of his work and the circumstances surrounding it. To be clear: I do not imagine that this treatment of Ganneau is intentional. Presumably, through his search for his strips Tigay has come (understandably) to identify with Shapira, and therefore casts Ganneau as the main villain – and this naturally but unfortunately leads to things like the use of unreliable sources without due diligence and sloppy analysis that consistently cuts against Ganneau.

Meanwhile, Shapira, in Tigay’s account, is “brilliant,” a “genius,” a “virtuoso forger,” and compared to Mozart. But there is little concrete evidence to support these praises beyond the much more subdued assessments in a trade school evaluation (p. 42). In fact, I think it is pretty clear Shapira was not a virtuoso forger. Certainly he was good enough to make money off some of them (the Moabitica, the Philadelphia scrolls). But I am aware of seven Shapira forgeries or groups of forgeries that have been identified: all were detected during his lifetime; they were all revealed during his lifetime too (except the Philadelphia scrolls that were first declared forgeries by Isaac Hollister Hall, not Cyrus Adler as Tigay has it, two months after Shapira’s death). Most of those who were qualified to judge his material were easily able to detect them as forgeries – if Adler is to be believed, an undergraduate did in one case. This is especially true with the Shapira strips: every single scholar who considered them (Ginsburg, Clermont-Ganneau, Conder, Sayce, Neubauer, Guthe, etc.) concluded that they were forged. The one possible exception is the German scholar of Semitics Paul Schröder – but here we only have Shapira’s word; Schröder later denied that he ever claimed them to be authentic. Compare Shapira’s record to actual virtuoso forgers whose work goes undetected for decades and fools multiple scholars.

Here we hit on the real problems with the book: romanticizing a forger and his frauds, with all of the ethical problems that result from this; and sensationalizing the study of the past, treating it as a whodunit to be solved (when instead scholars typically look at their work as trying to improve understandings of a never fully recoverable past). This involves the need to provide a sufficiently engaging plot, with a strong enough central conflict. Taking 300 pages to pretend that there is a real question about the authenticity of the strips when the overwhelming scholarly consensus has always been that they are obvious forgeries. Insisting that we need to find the strips, or conduct a multi-year search for them, to find out what kind of a person Shapira truly was, when we already knew that he built a career on making and selling forgeries and stealing manuscripts from Jewish communities in Yemen (pp. 195-197).

But this type of sensationalism is typical of public presentations of scholarship and the study of the past. Is this inevitable? Or can we do better?

Thanks to Felicity Cobbing for valuable assistance.

Reflections on the Mycenaean "Griffin Warrior" Tomb at Pylos

This month, Smithsonian magazine has a long article by Jo Marchant on an important Mycenaean tomb at Pylos, dubbed the tomb of the “Griffin Warrior.” In light of this article, I believe it is very much worth looking at the details of the tomb, as well as at how scholars and journalists are presenting it.

The Tomb

(Note: the most accurate and detailed source of information on the tomb and its finds is an academic article by the co-directors of the excavation, Jack Davis and Sharon Stocker of the University of Cincinnati: “The Lord of the Rings: The Griffin Warrior of Pylos,” in the journal Hesperia [85 no. 4] from October 2016.)

The tomb was discovered in May 2015 at Ano Englianos, the site of ancient Pylos. This was the first season of renewed excavations in the area of the palace at Pylos (the famous earlier excavations by the University of Cincinnati, led by Carl Blegen, had discovered the palace and its archive of Linear B tablets). The 2015 excavation carried on past the scheduled season until the tomb was fully cleared (late October). In 2016, a second season of excavations including digging trenches alongside the tomb in order to clarify the sequence of its construction.

The tomb contained a single body with a wealth of finds: cups, pitchers, and basins of gold, silver, and bronze – no ceramics; four gold seal rings and 50 seal stones carved with intricate designs; bronze weapons with hilts of gold and ivory, and a helmet made of boars tusks; hundreds of beads of gold, glass, and semi-precious stones; an ivory plaque showing a griffin; six ivory combs; a bronze mirror with an ivory handle; and a bronze bull’s head, originally topping a staff. Most of the material is related to Minoan Crete, whether coming from Crete itself or made in Cretan style. It is still unclear exactly how many objects were buried with the deceased, though the number is certainly many hundreds. Some reports have said 2,000+, but this refers to the total number of registration numbers given out, and many objects were broken and have a registration number for each fragment.

The tomb is a large shaft dug into the ground and lined with stone slabs and rubble. Shaft graves are best known from Mycenae, where two grave circles (Grave Circle A and Grave Circle B) with incredibly rich shafts were found by Schliemann in the 1870s and Greek excavations under Papadimitriou and Mylonas in the 1950s – again with large amounts of material related to Minoan Crete.

While there was no pottery among the grave goods deposited with the body, the tomb could be dated by pottery in the fills deposited during its construction. Late Helladic (LH) I-IIA sherds were found in the fill laid to make the floor of the tomb as well as in the fill along what was once the coffin and along the outer walls of the tomb. We can therefore date the tomb by the latest pottery found in these fills: LHIIA, c. 1500 BCE. This places the tomb at the tail end of the Grave Circle phenomenon known from Mycenae, c. 1650 or 1600 to 1500 BCE.

This is one of the richest Mycenaean tombs found since Schliemann’s Grave Circle A. And, because of improvements in excavation and recording techniques, and because the Griffin Warrior tomb was a single burial (unlike most of the Mycenae shaft graves), we can learn still learn a great deal about shaft graves and burial practices from this discovery.

The Publicity

The initial set of stories on the tomb waited until the grave was fully excavated, in late October 2015. A second set of stories followed almost a year later (early October 2016), marking the publication of the first academic journal article on the tomb and presenting some of the findings from that article. The Smithsonian followed with a longer piece at the beginning of January 2017.

In these stories we see a progression from more reserved to less reserved claims. We also see this trend in the progression from academic article to popular news reports.

The first crop of news articles made relatively understated claims, with several qualifications: “could be,” will “help” understand the emergence of Mycenaean palaces, will “deepen” our knowledge of the relationship between Minoan Crete and the Mycenaean mainland. A year later, after the initial analysis and preceding publication of first scholarly article: the grave “throws light” on how Minoan culture spread to the mainland, and “offers evidence that Mycenaean culture recognized and appreciated Minoan culture more than previously believed.” There are changes after the analysis: Archaeologists “now believe” the rings and gemstones of the Griffin Warrior were “possessions from his culture” and not “loot” from Crete; the analysis “points to the exchange of ideas and goods” between Crete and the mainland. But the discussion is still fairly restrained.

With the new Smithsonian article, we see something very different. This starts with the headline: the tomb “upended what we thought we knew about the roots of Western civilization”. (Compare the earlier headlines: in the first round, the tomb “could be a gateway to ancient civilizations”; in the second round, the rings “connect two ancient Greek cultures.”) Based on no new evidence beyond what was known in October 2016, there is a massive difference in both tone (definitive, and even past tense) and scope (“upended,” and not just two cultures but the roots of all of Western civilization). Of course, headlines are often meant to be attention-grabbing, but this tone and scope is matched in the text of the article. We read, for instance, that the tomb “offers a radical new perspective,” not only on the two cultures but through them on “Europe’s cultural origins” (though we read in the rest of the paragraph that the finds match those from the shaft graves of Mycenae and on Crete). We find the archaeologist Davis speculating that the relatively “egalitarian” society (strange when considering the massive wealth of this individual man’s grave) of Mycenaean Greece might have laid the foundation for the emergence of Athenian democracy a millennium later, and for all democracies.

Compare this to the academic article in Hesperia from October: The boldest claim made is in the conclusion: “These and other associations that we will explore in future publications promise to open new doors to our understanding of the Mycenaean belief system. . .” But mostly we find something much different: the tomb provides “new data about Minoan/Mycenaean iconography and Mycenaean burial customs.” The four gold signet rings “confirm” a more intensive relationship at the beginning of the Late Bronze Age between Pylos and Minoan Crete than thought before. In general, the statements are less absolute, much narrower in scope, and instead of something radical the discovery “confirms” something we knew before, just with “new data.”

So what is the evidence on which the new Smithsonian article bases its major claims? It is mostly the same evidence provided in the academic article: the analysis of the four rings and the arrangement of the grave goods. Weapons were placed on the left side of the body, rings and seal stones on the right. Davis and Stocker suggest that individual items in the burial were matched to those depicted on the gold rings: a mirror, a bull’s head from a staff.

Based on this, Marchant writes in the Smithsonian article: “In their [Davis and Stocker’s] view, the arrangement of objects in the grave provides the first real evidence that the mainland elite were experts in Minoan ideas and customs, who understood very well the symbolic meaning of the products they acquired. ‘The grave shows these are not just knuckle-scraping, Neanderthal Mycenaeans who were completely bowled over by the very existence of Minoan culture,” says [British archaeologist John] Bennet. “They know what these objects are.’”

In Hesperia, Davis and Stocker are very cautious – and rightly so – with the conclusions they draw. They introduce their analysis with a skeptical quote from Emily Vermeule from the 1970s: “Most prehistoric art is not really understandable. There is no convincing way to relate designs on gold to burial rites or to religion or community symbols of belief.” This is entirely correct: How can we know if the Mycenaean Greeks understood Minoan symbolism, when we don’t understand much about Minoan (or Mycenaean, for that matter) symbolism ourselves? If anything, we should be even more cautious than Davis and Stocker are in the Hesperia article. They believe that the people who buried the Griffin Warrior matched specific items (a bull’s head from a staff, a mirror) to objects depicted on the gold rings. Yet they use language that indicates the identification of those objects on the rings isn’t certain: “seemingly horns”; “which we interpret as a mirror.” So we must raise a question that Davis and Stocker do not: If the mirror and the bull’s head had not been buried in the grave, would they have interpreted the objects on the rings in the same way? That is, to what extent was their interpretation of the rings guided by those finds? Even if Davis and Stocker are correct about the matching of grave goods to the images on the rings, it is possible that the Minoan craftsmen originally intended to represent other objects, but that these were reinterpreted by the Mycenaean buriers as a mirror and a bull’s head.

Either way, nothing justifies the suggestion by Marchant that the people of Pylos understood Minoan iconography. Davis and Stocker suggest otherwise in the academic article: they write that Minoan gold rings on the mainland “were recontextualized in graves like that of the Griffin Warrior” –new contexts, and therefore new meanings.

The Smithsonian article does introduce one new piece of evidence for its dramatic claims, but not from the tomb itself. The 2016 excavations at Pylos revealed fragments of wall paintings at mansion houses (that the palace was later built over) – these are suggested to be the oldest wall paintings found on mainland Greece. The paintings show strong Minoan influence, with nature scenes including papyrus flowers. According to Marchant: “Together, the grave goods and the wall paintings present a remarkable case that the first wave of Mycenaean elite embraced Minoan culture. . . This has led Davis and Stocker to favor the idea that the two cultures became entwined at a very early stage.”

But does the evidence, and Davis and Stocker’s conclusion, really “upend” our understanding of how Mycenaean culture developed? For most of the last two centuries, there have been perhaps two major understandings of this emergence:

1.    Mycenaean culture is simply Minoan culture spread to mainland Greece; it was brought Cretan colonists. This was the view of Arthur Evans, and was dominant in the first half of the twentieth century.

2.    The Minoan-related wealth of early Mycenaean culture is elite emulation: mainland Greek elites adopting the trappings of the then-dominant culture, Minoan Crete. This view became more popular in the second half of the twentieth century, after the decipherment of Linear B (the writing of the mainland Greek palaces) showed it to be used to write Greek (as opposed to Linear A, the earlier writing of the Cretan palaces).

How does the new evidence – Minoan-style wealth in the Griffin Warrior grave and Minoan-style wall paintings on the early houses of Pylos – not fit into either of these two reconstructions?

The reality is that the new idea that Davis and Stocker favor is not all that new. As Marchant describes it, it is a form of what is called “entanglement.” Entanglement is the idea that the interaction of two cultures leads to a blending of those cultures, not the imposition or adoption of one over the other (especially in the case of colonialism). This idea has been increasingly influential in the archaeology of the Aegean Bronze Age over the last several years. Marchant even hints at this: immediately after presenting it as a new idea, she writes that it “fits recent suggestions” about the end of the Minoan palaces on Crete.

Reading between the lines, we see that the new evidence plays little role in the adoption of the theory of entanglement here. (This is even more evident when we remember that the Griffin Warrior tomb does not present “the Mycenaean belief system at the moment of its creation,” as Davis and Stocker write in Hesperia, but comes roughly a century after the start of the Shaft Grave phenomenon.)

Entanglement, like colonization and emulation, is a model. The goal of scholarship is generally not to determine what actually happened in the past (which is often impossible), but to improve our understanding of the past – to come up with the best models possible.

As we see in this case, models are often driven not so much by new evidence as by new scholarly developments, the emergence of new theories. New evidence may be the immediate catalyst, but the process of change is much deeper.

Entanglement, at least in many cases, is probably a better model than what came before: it is a more sophisticated approach to understanding how cultures interact than simply asserting the dominance of one culture over another. But it is still a model, an imperfect explanation. Thirty or forty years from now, few scholars will be talking about entanglement; we will have new models, presumably better models, or we may even be asking different questions entirely.

All of this means that the interpretations we make are driven as much by our own beliefs as by the evidence of the past – as much by the present as by the past. Far from timeless, our models are very much of our time.

For evidence of this, we need to look only at the end of Marchant’s Smithsonian article. There we see Davis and Stocker tying their discovery to the emergence of democracies –that is, to us. We see the journalist tying entanglement in with rise of nationalism and xenophobia today. And we find a British archaeologist (John Bennet) looking at the interaction of Mycenaeans and Minoans and seeing the European Union. All of this reflects much of the current response of liberalism to Brexit, anti-immigration policies, and the election of Trump, projected into the past. The specific models and analogies used here seem forced and stretched.

Of course, it is good that scholars try to relate the past to the present. This is essential work, and an essential reason why scholarly work is relevant. But – and this is a huge caveat – we should be suspicious when we look into the past and see a reflection of ourselves, as if in a mirror.