Fake ancient artifacts are all over the antiquities market. For a layperson with no expertise in ancient art, telling the difference between a bust created by a forger to look like an ancient bust and a real ancient bust is virtually impossible. For a trained expert, it is easy to spot certain obvious forgeries, but there are still many forgeries out there that are good enough to fool even the best experts.
The antiquities market, though, is incredibly sketchy at the best of times and downright illegal at the worst of times. If you’re trying to buy ancient artifacts, forgeries should be the least of your worries.
Exercise #1: Busts of Sophokles
The easiest way to give people an impression of how hard it is tell authentic ancient sculptures from modern sculptures imitating them is to have them try to do it for themselves.
I have posted four photographs below depicting four different busts of the ancient Athenian tragic playwright Sophokles (lived c. 497 – c. 406 BC). All of these busts look ancient, but only one of them is an authentic ancient original. I want you to try to guess which one it is:
Here are the correct answers:
- Bust A is a modern carved marble bust of Sophokles from the Achilleion on the Greek island of Kerkyra.
- Bust B is an authentic ancient sculpture of Sophokles carved from Pentelic marble dating to around the first or second century AD.
- Bust C is a cheap modern alabaster-and-resin bust that you can buy online for just $23.90.
- Bust D is a modern plaster cast of a real bust that is on display in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.
Exercise #2: Busts of Perikles
Ok, maybe you didn’t get the first one right and you’d like another try. Below I have posted four photographs of four different busts of the ancient Athenian statesman Perikles (lived c. 495 – 429 BC). This time, three of the busts shown are authentic ancient busts and only one of them is modern. I want you to try to guess which one is modern:
Ok, here are the correct answers:
- Bust A is an authentic ancient Roman marble copy of an ancient Greek bust of Perikles on display in the Vatican Museums.
- Bust B is an authentic ancient Roman marble copy of an ancient Greek bust of Perikles on display in the British Museum in London.
- Bust C is a modern resin copy of the ancient marble bust of Perikles on display in the British Museum that sold at Bonhams for £701 in October 2019.
- Bust D is an authentic ancient Roman copy of an ancient Greek bust of Perikles on display in the Altes Museum in Berlin.
Identifying obvious forgeries
Believe it or not, both of the exercises above are extremely easy compared to the task of telling forgeries and authentic busts apart, because none of the modern busts shown above were even created as deliberate forgeries; the creators of these busts weren’t trying to fool anyone.
Any expert could easily spot which of these busts was authentic in an instant. If you don’t have any experience or training in recognizing ancient Greek busts, though, you probably struggled to tell which ones were really ancient and which ones were modern.
It is easy for an expert to spot an obvious fake. Here are some pieces of evidence that make it obvious that a sculpture is not really ancient:
- The bust may be made of the wrong material. For instance, if the bust is made of plaster or “cast marble” (i.e. marble and resin), then it is pretty obvious that it is not a real ancient bust.
- The bust may be clearly manufactured in a way that genuine ancient sculptures aren’t. For instance, it may have been carved using modern tools that didn’t exist in antiquity.
- The style of the bust may be wrong. For instance, the bust might have an inscription with lettering that doesn’t match the time period or it might mix styles from different time periods in a way that a genuine ancient sculpture wouldn’t.
A very large portion of the objects on the antiquities market are obvious fakes. Nonetheless, most people buying antiquities nowadays are private collectors who have no legitimate expertise in the kind of antiquities they are buying, so these forgeries tend to sell very well.
Identifying skilled forgeries—extremely difficult to impossible, even for experts
Unfortunately, while there are certainly a lot of obvious forgeries out there on the art market, many fake ancient sculptures are not obviously fake. There are some forgers out there who are extraordinarily knowledgeable, careful, and skilled who are able to make fake ancient sculptures that can fool even the best of experts.
The forgers who are capable of making these kinds of sophisticated forgeries are usually experts in their own right who have studied the kind of art they are ripping off for years or even decades. They know everything that is known about the methods used by ancient artists, they’ve intently studied the style of the ancient art they’re imitating, they’ve practiced making forgeries many times, and they’ve developed extremely devious methods of making their own artwork look ancient.
Let’s look at a well-known example of an extremely well-made forgery. A kouros is a kind of archaic Greek sculpture of a nude young man standing with stiff posture. Below I have posted six photographs of six different kouroi. Five of them are presumed to be authentic. One of them, though, is an extremely well-made forgery that fooled some of the best experts on ancient Greek art in the world. I want you to try to guess which one is the fake based solely on appearance:
It’s hard, isn’t it? All of these sculptures look ancient. How is someone supposed to tell the difference?
The forgery in this lineup is the Getty Kouros, which is the third one from the left, shown here between the New York Kouros and the Kroisos Kouros. The other five kouroi shown here are all currently believed to be authentic.
The Getty Kouros first appeared on the art market in 1983 with no prior provenance. The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California had their experts examine the kouros. In 1985, after their experts concluded that the kouros was authentic, the museum purchased it for the extraordinary sum of ten million dollars.
Despite the prodigious amount of cash that the Getty Museum sank into it, the Getty Kouros is now generally agreed to be a fake. The Getty Museum has taken the sculpture off display and their own website gives the date of the sculpture as “about 530 B.C. or modern forgery.”
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Getty Kouros, one of the most famous art forgeries of modern times
Forgeries, provenance, and looted artifacts
It is partly because of the existence of extremely sophisticated forgeries like the Getty Kouros that something called provenance is so important. The provenance of a work of art is the record of that work of art’s ownership history. It is extremely important that a work of art have a reliable and complete provenance because the only way to be sure that the work of art isn’t a forgery is if you know exactly where it came and who has owned it.
A work of art having a reliable provenance is also important because it is the only way to be sure that the work of art isn’t looted (i.e. taken illegally from an ancient site by amateur treasure-seekers hoping to make money) or stolen. The vast majority of the authentic ancient artifacts on the antiquities market today have been illegally looted.
Buying looted artifacts is bad for several reasons. One reason why it is bad is because it encourages looting. Looting is bad partly because it results in the permanent destruction of valuable information about the ancient past. Ancient artifacts are valuable largely because of what they can tell us about the past. That’s the reason why an authentic ancient bust is worth more than a modern imitation of an ancient bust.
The exact location at which an artifact was found, the exact placement of the artifact in that location, the other artifacts that the artifact was found with, and the precise details of the position and appearance of the object at the time it was found are all extremely important pieces of information that need to be recorded.
When professional archaeologists excavate ancient artifacts, they keep extremely meticulous record of all these details and more. When looters dig up artifacts illegally, though, they destroy all that information so that no one will ever be able to find out where or how the artifact was discovered. All the information that we could have gained from the context in which the artifact was found is irretrievably lost.
Furthermore, since looters only care about artifacts that they think will have monetary value, they automatically throw out or destroy any artifacts they find that they don’t think would fetch a high price on the antiquities market. Looters are more than happy to destroy entire ancient sites in the mad search for artifacts that might fetch a high value. Large numbers of ancient remains are damaged or destroyed each year by looters and when someone buys looted artifacts, they are supporting that destruction.
Finally, when archaeologists excavate ancient artifacts, those artifacts usually go to a museum or a collection where they can be kept for future study. When looters take artifacts, those artifacts usually get sold. Sometimes they ultimately end up in museums, but more often than not they end up in private collections where the public cannot see them and experts cannot study them.
ABOVE: Photograph of looted artifacts from this article from MentalFloss
Artifacts stolen from museums
Many of the artifacts on the antiquities market aren’t just looted; they’re actually stolen—and, by that, I mean that they were in a museum or a collection somewhere and then taken illegally. Due to the widespread instability that has existed in the Middle East for the past two decades, museums all across Iraq and Syria have been raided and many of the artifacts from them have been illegally sold for profit.
For instance, as I mention in this article I published in March 2020, during the United States-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Iraq Museum in Baghdad was utterly ransacked and roughly half the artifacts in the museum’s collection, including many of its most famous artifacts, were stolen.
Eventually, after many years of desperate searching and intense cooperation from foreign governments, the Iraq Museum managed to recover about half the artifacts that were stolen from its collection, including the famous Warka Vase and the Mask of Warka, but about a quarter of its collection is still missing. The missing artifacts include some of the museum’s most famous.
For instance, you may have heard of the so-called “Baghdad battery” (which is actually not a battery at all, but rather a scroll container). What you may not have heard is that no one knows where the original one is; the original artifact that prompted the whole myth of the “Baghdad battery” was stolen from the museum in 2003 and has never been found.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Iraq Museum in 2006. The Iraq Museum was totally raided during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. About a quarter of its collection is still missing; many of the artifacts have probably either been sold illegally or are hidden so they can be sold later.
Meet the people you may be supporting by buying ancient artifacts!
Furthermore, when you buy ancient artifacts, there are a lot of really terrible people you may be indirectly patronizing without even knowing it. Criminal gangs and terrorist organizations are some of the biggest beneficiaries of the antiquities market. As a direct result of instability in the Middle East right now, the antiquities market has been flooded with artifacts that have been looted by various militant and terrorist groups.
Most notoriously, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) has looted hundreds of thousands of ancient artifacts from sites all over the Middle East and sold them for cash. No one is quite sure how much money ISIL has made from selling antiquities, but it’s definitely at least several million dollars and it may be as much as seven billion. A large portion of that money probably comes from unsuspecting westerners who had no idea they were helping to fund ISIL.
Even though ISIL’s power has declined, people affiliated with ISIL are still selling ancient artifacts pillaged from various sites across the Middle East. They are especially using websites eBay, Amazon, Facebook, and WhatsApp to hawk their illegal wares.
Meanwhile, ISIL is far from the only militant group that is selling illegally obtained ancient artifacts. If you buy ancient artifacts of unknown provenance, you should be aware that there is a very high chance that you are funding some seriously dangerous people.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an Islamic State fighter during the Tongo Tongo ambush on 4 October 2017, from the helmet camera of a fallen United States soldier. If you buy ancient artifacts of unknown or unreliable provenance, you may be funding ISIL.
Conclusion
The best advice I can give is that you just shouldn’t buy ancient artifacts at all. The antiquities market is inherently extremely sketchy; that’s the way it has always been and the way it probably always will be. Honestly, if you do buy alleged an ancient artifact and the worst thing that results from that is that the artifact turns out to be a forgery, you’ve probably gotten lucky.
If you just want to see ancient artifacts firsthand, you can always go to a museum; you don’t need to buy artifacts for yourself. (We won’t talk about the fact that many of the ancient artifacts on display in museums in the English-speaking world are probably stolen as well.)
