Cuneiform Fakes: A Long History from Antiquity to the Present Day

During the three millennia in which cuneiform script was used, scribes copied texts for educational purposes or to preserve existing knowledge. They also created new texts, even reproducing older scripts in some cases. Some of the antique fakes that were produced in the process, such as the cruciform monument to Maništušu, are well known to Assyriologists, but the authenticity of other texts is still being debated, one example being the royal letters of the kings of Ur. In legal texts and royal inscriptions, certain clauses prevented the possible appearance of a false document. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, archaeological excavations in the Near East brought hundreds of thousands of cuneiform tablets to light and caused people’s interest in Mesopotamian antiquities to grow. This led to the production of modern fakes, too, for obvious economic reasons, and many of these were bought by private collectors and museums around the world. This article deals with a great variety of such cases, including copies, replicas, imitations, transformations and fakes, in a bid to understand the context in which they were made, what motivated their originators and, when possible, how they were treated by scholars and collectors. During the three millennia in which cuneiform script was employed (from the late fourth millennium BCE to the first century CE), scribes produced a great variety of texts, mainly on clay, but also on other materials such as stone, metal or wooden board covered with wax. To date, more than a million cuneiform texts have been discovered in a large area of the Near East ranging from Anatolia to Iran and from northern Iraq to Egypt and Bahrain. Cuneiform script, which was created with a stylus pressed down on fresh clay, consists of combinations of wedges forming as many signs as necessary. The system is ingenious and very easy to reproduce, but the scribes had to memorise a large number of different signs. Most of the collections around the world include some fake pieces of writing, either antique || 1 The word ‘fake’ is used in a generic sense here, referring to a written artefact that appears to be something it is not.