posted
I will use this thread to discuss in the issue of the falsification of Ancient Egyptian art and remains.
There's 2 main categories:
1) Recent falsification (post dynastic time excluding Persians, Greek rules of AE) . Usually done in Europe by art forgers to make money off fake Ancient Egyptian art and mummy remains.
2) Ancient falsification/recarving done in dynastic time. Done to give themselves prestige by associating Ancient renown pharaoh or dynasty of the past with themselves. I include in this category those of the Ptolemaic dynasty, Persian rules, etc.
This is of interest for us because the people who did the last falsification of Ancient Egyptians art and remains were foreign people. Either foreign late dynasties (Persians, Assyrians), Romans, Greeks, etc or European art forgers.
So what is left to us of Ancient Egyptian arts and mummy remains are those that are either falsified, vandalized or intact and/or not found by late foreign dynasties.
Posts: 2981 | Registered: Jan 2012
| IP: Logged |
posted
Here's an excerpt from Religion in Ancient Egypt: Gods, Myths, and Personal Practice edited by Byron Esely Shafer, Leonard H. Lesko, David P. Silverman about that phenomenon (available through google books preview):
quote:Such concept may have underlain the not uncommon royal practice of "borrowing" predecessors' exploits, statues, and monuments, appropriating them as one's own. Recarving an earlier monarch's statuary to reflect the features and titulary of the new ruler was not considered and act of sacrilege, for the statue represented the office of the king as well as the king's person.
This is very big: Recarving an earlier monarch's statuary to reflect the features and titulary of the new ruler.
Posts: 2981 | Registered: Jan 2012
| IP: Logged |
posted
This is the recent article (January 2015) that reminded me of that phenomenon. It's even more supprising
Archaeologists and experts say two mummies in the Vatican Museum are fakes
The two mini mummies were long believed to be of a child, animal or possibly a falcon but can now be revealed as forgeries
By Andrea Vogt, Bologna
21 Jan 2015
Researchers studying mummies housed in the Vatican Museums have said they have discovered that two of them are fakes.
“These mummies are important evidence of the phenomenon of falsification that managed to regularly fool collectors and sometimes scholars ,” said Alessia Amenta, Egyptologist and curator of the Vatican Museum’s department for the antiquities of Egypt and the Near East.
Scientists at the Vatican Museum’s diagnostic laboratory for conservation and restoration have been analysing the two mummy forgeries for the last year, and say they can finally reveal the techniques charlatans used to pass them off as real. They present their research on Thursday in Rome, finally unmasking the myth of these two mini mummies, which were long believed to be of a child, animal or possibly a falcon.
The two fakes are among the 9 full mummified bodies and 18 body parts housed in Vatican Museum collections. Researchers initiated the Vatican Mummy Project in 2007 to start cataloguing, studying and conserving the human specimens, which need special climate control systems to slow the decaying process and protect precious DNA that could shed new light on genetic evolution of today’s diseases.
The mummification treatment and wrapping of the corpse to preserve the body for eternity was practiced in ancient Egypt for nearly four thousand years. Many mummies managed to survive intact today, but there are also dozens of fakes dating back to the “mummy mania” era that exploded after Napoleon’s 1798 expedition to Egypt. In the US and Britain especially, public unwrappings of ancient remains were a popular “afternoon tea” spectacle, with onlookers sometimes paying handsomely to see what was inside.
When Vatican researchers set out to do their own “unwrapping” of the two 60-centimetre long mummies, they found that in fact the bandages date back to ancient Egypt, but that was about all. The three-dimensional painted coverings made of plaster and linen bandages -- called cartonnage -- had a yellowish resin that researchers say is unique to Europe in the mid-19th century, often used in Britain to give antiques a gilded coating.
A 3D CAT scan revealed that inside the bandages was a human shinbone, the tibia of an adult from medieval times.
X-Rays, CT scans, DNA tests and other diagnostics being conducted on several other real mummies in the Vatican have revealed fascinating details about the lives of the person embalmed. One mummy had a small tumour on its scalp, while another that was long believed to be female, turned out to be a man.
UBBFriend: Email this page to someone!
Printer-friendly view of this topic