I am indebted to Dr. G. A. Reisner for the following story and incidents, and for others which are incorporated in the earlier chapters of this book.

“It was in the summer of 1902, I think, that a couple of young men from the west bank of the Nile at Thebes visited a dealer in antiquities whose shop is in Luxor. After general conversation, coffee drinking, and so forth, they finally asked the proprietor if he wished to buy any antiquities.

“‘Certainly,’ he said, ‘if they are genuine.’

“‘Will you believe they are genuine if you see them in position in the tomb in which they were found?’ they asked.

“‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘Have you got a tomb?’

“They said they had, and made arrangements to take him to it at midnight, two or three nights later.

“When the night and the hour came, they met at the appointed place and proceeded towards the tomb. On the road there was a fierce whispered alarm that the guards were coming, and the party scattered in all directions. The next night a second appointment was made, and this time the party reached the entrance to the tomb. The doorway was blocked up, except for a small hole, and sealed with what seemed to be ancient mud-plaster. They tore down this block and entered the tomb, a large rock-cut chamber, literally filled with antiquities—stelÆ, ushebti, coffins, vases, and other objects, apparently covered with the dust of ages.

PLATE XIV.

“The party then adjourned to Luxor to discuss the price. The dealer finally bought the lot for something like £600, and was obliged to raise a mortgage on some property in order to get the money. After great difficulties in avoiding the guards, the objects were finally transferred from the tomb to the dealer’s house in Luxor. The summer passed in pleasant dreams of winter profits, and finally the first Museum buyer arrived on the scene. The dealer selected a stone from the purchased lot, and carried it round to the house of a friend where the Egyptologist happened to be engaged in negotiations for the purchase of some antiquities. The dealer called his friend to the door, and asked him to show the stelÆ to the buyer. His friend smiled and said, ‘It is a forgery.’

“The dealer laughed in derision, and insisted on the stone being shown to the expert, who took one look at it and said, ‘Rank forgery.’

“The dealer, who had found this in what seemed to be an untouched tomb, now became thoroughly alarmed. At his request, his friend and the Egyptologist went to his house to inspect all the objects from the tomb. They were all forgeries, and the dealer had been swindled out of his £600 by a cleverly-planned trick of the west bank forgers.”

The Egyptians who are engaged in the making of spurious antiquities are now specialising. One man in Luxor has perfected the manufacture of glazed or faience vessels. Another at Qeneh has developed the cutting and inscription of stone scarabs. At Aboutig a forger makes woodwork and carved ivories, and somewhere in Egypt they are making stone vessels of all periods, apparently on a steam lathe, but copying the ancient forms with great success. A dealer in Cairo once showed me an enormous head of Amenemhat III., which he said was offered to him as coming from Tanis. This must have been the work of European stone-masons. It was cut from a single large boulder of sandstone, an exact copy of the existing portraits of that king, but the cutting had been done with modern stone-masons’ tools, the marks of which were plainly visible, even without a glass.

“On another occasion,” Dr. Reisner tells us, “I was once looking through the stock of a dealer, now dead. Suddenly I caught sight in the back of a drawer of what appeared to be a Babylonian object. The dealer, who happened to know that I have some knowledge of Babylonian antiquities, was very reluctant to show me the object, protesting openly that it was a forgery. I persuaded him, however, and he produced a dozen or more very beautifully made Babylonian sculptures, but all perfectly impossible. He said that he received them from a Persian, an agent who came through Cairo every year, and left him a certain number of pieces to sell on commission. I tried to buy one of these pieces, offering even as high as £5 for it, against the £40 he demanded, but he refused. When I came back in the spring, he told me with a grin that he had sold them all at his own price to various travellers.

“I afterwards learned the forger’s name, and that he lived in Baghdad, from an excavator who had been working in Mesopotamia. This man also forged cuneiform tablets, and I have seen examples of his work in other shops in Cairo besides the one I have mentioned. He first began his forgery of the cuneiform tablets by making moulds of the two sides, pressing clay into the moulds and sticking the two halves together before baking. These forgeries were always discernible by the shallowness of the little wedges of which the writing is composed. This seems to have been pointed out to him, for after a time he began going over these tablets with a pointed stick before baking, and thus deepening the wedges. Finally, with the practice thus gained, he even went so far as to copy tablets freehand; and I know of at least one large tablet in a European museum which he made freehand without any tablet to copy from. It has all the appearance of one of the great tablets from the temple at Telloh, but the writing has no meaning.”