Eighth month, ITU UDU-ŠU-ŠE-IL-LA-NINA ITU UDU-ŠU-ŠE-A-NINA-TIL-LA-BA1 ITU UDU-ŠU-ŠE-A-"NIN-GIR-SU ITU GUR-DUB-BA-A ITU GUR-IMI-A-TA ITU GUR-IMI-GABA-A ITU ŠI-NAM-DUB-NI-BA-DUR-BA-A Ninth month, May-June, ITU HAR-RA-NE-MA-A ITU HAR-RA-NE-MA-A-NINA Tenth month, June-July, ITE EZEN-NE-GUN-NA Eleventh month, ITU EZEN-BULUK-KÙ-dNIN-GIR-SU (?) ITU NIN-GIR-SU-E-BIL-AN-TA- (?) ITU AN-TA-SUR-RA Twelfth month, Aug.-Sept., ITU EZEN-LUGAL-ERIM ki ITU MUL-BABBAR-SAG-E-TA ŠUB-A-A Intercalary month, ITU BABBAR-MIN-GÀL-LA-A 1 H 26. [March, 1913.] Two Forged Antiques. - By RICHARD GOTTHEIL, Professor in Columbia University, New York City. Archaeological frauds have been multiplying rapidly of late, and this country has become a dumping-ground for forgeries of many kinds. Not a few modern antiques-aged long before their time have found a resting place in our public and private collections. It has fallen to my lot to assist in the exposure of several such frauds. In 1890 I brought to the attention of this Society an Alhambra vase belonging to this category; in 1909, a pair of beautiful doors said to have come from the madrasah of the Mameluke Sultan Barkūk, in Cairo; and in the same year, a manuscript of that arch-forger of Arabic History in the Island of Sicily, Vella. This last-named forgery is one of the two described in the following pages. A. A Remarkable Gold Amulet. During the last five or six years a certain number of amulets made of gold or silver foil have come to light, covered for the most part with Hebrew inscriptions. With the exception of one or two, these amulets are now in the possession of the New York Public Library. They are said to have been found in graves excavated at Irbid in the Hauran; a statement which rests entirely upon the good faith (God save the mark!) of the dealers themselves. At the last meeting of this society, Professor Montgomery favored us with a translation of two of these amulets. Since then, one further copy has been brought to this country, which raises the number of these objects in the New York Public Library to six. It is with the sixth that the present paper has to do. In size and general appearance, it is easily recognized as belonging to the same class as the other amulets, though it is the first of the larger size to be presented in gold. As an ord inary amulet, it would not especially arouse our interest; but when we come to examine the writing upon it, our curiosity is engaged. The surface is divided into two fields, which are evidently quite distinct one from the other. The first field contains writing evidently meant to be either Phoenician or old Aramaic a strange circumstance in itself, as the previous finds seem to point to a community of Jews living in Irbid during the first centuries of our era, when the Aramaic script had long given way to the so-called square characters. This circumstance, however, might pass; it would only make it necessary that we revise our dates in connection with this community. But the Aramaic inscription contains nothing but variations of portions of the ordinary Semitic alphabet, first in its regular and secondly in its reverse order; the socalled abgad, and its complement the tashrak. Even so, we might hesitate to declare ourselves doubters, when we remember the many uses made of the alphabet by mystics of early times and down through the Middle Ages; or, again, our amulet-maker might have belonged to the class of simpleminded and God-fearing men, like the monk in the story of Luther, who told merely the alphabet on their beads, prefering that God himself should put the letters into words. pleasing in His sight. Yet, we are led to doubt the simplicity of the simple-minded man in our own case, for he has mixed up Phoenician or Aramaic letters of various epochs and has used some which belong to no epoch at all. Finally, at the end of the first two fields, he has added a line of letters that to all intents and purposes are Samaritan in character. The examination of the second field confirms us as doubters. The Aramaic inscription in equivocal characters to which is attached a line of Samaritan is bad enough; but when to this is joined an old Babylonian inscription, the climax is certainly reached. For the Babylonian inscription is an old acquaintance found on a mace head of Sargon of Agade, whose name and title it gives.1 This much, at least, can be said: the forger of the amulet was a man of no ordinary talent. He certainly had imagin 1 Shar ganni | Shar ali | Shar A-ga-de ki | a-na | ilu Shamash | in ilu UdKib-nun ki (=Sippar). See, e. g. Ball, Light from the East, p. 52; Radau p. 161, note. ation, and a sense of historical proportion, if historical importance is measured by bigness. He has roamed at will over a space of some three or four thousand years; but we should be thankful to him for this, for it has enabled us the more easily to follow his somewhat tortuous footsteps. B. The "Kitāb Dīwān Misr". Authentic documents from the early centuries of Mohammedan dominion are of rare occurrence, and therefore are highly prized. It is only of late that the finds of Egyptian papyri have begun to yield of their fulness something in the service of Mohammedan studies. The hand of time and the negligence of man have ruthlessly destroyed the mass of records that must have existed in the chancelleries of the various Moslem empires. I was accordingly much surprised and delighted when, in 1908,1 I was shown a manuscript (said to have been brought to this country by an Italian sailor) bearing the title "Book of the Diwan of Egypt".2 The volume had all the outward marks of great age; even the bookworm had left many traces on the pages. The edges of the codex had been frayed, and each page was set in paper that was very evidently of much later date than the original. My interest was deepened still further by the deciphering of the opening paragraph. The manuscript contained nothing less than a copy of the letters which had come to the Egyptian Caliph Al-Mustanşir Billāh (1035–1094) from Arab rulers in Sicily and Tunis, and the answers of the Caliph to them; and the copy-it was asserted-had been made at the instance of the Caliph himself in the year of the Hejira 467. Here, indeed, was a find of considerable importance; for the reign of AlMustanşir was long and important. I had hardly gotten as far as this, when doubts began to be raised in my mind. How did the scribes of al-Mustanşir come to write in a well-defined Maghrebi script? True, it was not the intertwisted and entangled script in which later Maghrebis delight; but it bore all the hall-marks of this extraordinary development of Arabic writing. The manuscript 1 The account of this forgery was read at a meeting of this Society in the spring of 1909. کتاب دیوان مصر 2 |