andrewcriddle

I read the book very rapidly many years ago.

IMS there was real reason at the time to regard the material on which Shapira's Deuteronomy was written as too recent for the text in paleographically ancient Hebrew to be genuine.

However Allegro IMS makes a real case that disbelief at the time was at least as much based on the perceived improbabiilty of the survival of Hebrew texts from such ancient times as it was on the detailed evidence about the material on which the text was written.

Allegro's claim that after the discovery of the dead sea scrolls something like Shapira's material would now be accepted much less critically may in the light of recent events have been true in a way that Allegro did not quite mean.

Andrew Criddle

Vorkosigan

Shapira's Deut forgery was technically a fiasco, which was why it was exposed. Neil Asher Silberman had a piece in the SBL forum about forgeries.
http://www.sbl-site.org/Article.aspx?ArticleId=127

I personally find it quite...interesting...that this Shapira who found the Moabite stone (later Mesha Stele) was connected with dozens of fakes, including other "Moabite" fakes. I was reading up on him the other night. A fascinating character, and the case has many parallels to the current Golan nightmare.

Here is a lecture from Uri Dahari, who headed up the materials committee on the James Ossuary
http://www.studyantiquity.org/downlo...%20Lecture.pdf

spin

Vork, I find this comment apparently totally wrong, based on what Silberman says, ie What caused the comment that "Shapira's Deut forgery was technically a fiasco"? Where is the technical discussion? Silberman merely noted "the intellectual context" of 'the controversy over the biblical "Documentary Hypothesis"' adding that "the discovery was purported to be an earlier recension of the Book of Deuteronomy". So, did you get this "technically a fiasco" from somewhere else?


spin

Anat

After seeing the long list of suspect items, I wonder - how many pre-exilic inscriptions, ostraca etc are there in Hebrew and closely related languages that have no ties whatsoever with Golan?

Vorkosigan

Yes, I should have put in a break between the two sentences to make my meaning clearer. Very sorry.

Shapira's Deuteronomy forgery was not very well made.

Here's a bio of Shapira
http://www.explore-anthropology.com/...s_Shapira.html

• "Later Clermont-Ganneau showed that the parchment of the Deuteronomy scroll was cut out of a genuine Yemenite scroll that Shapira had also sold to the museum."

Sounds a lot like some people we could name today.

andrewcriddle

AFAIK the Moabite stone later Mesha Stele was found by CLERMONT-GANNEAU http://10.1911encyclopedia.org/C/CL/...RLES_SIMON.htm

IIUC Shapira's only connection to the Mesha Stele is that his 'Deuteronomy' brought forward a few years later was in a script very similar to that of the Stele.

Andrew Criddle

Vorkosigan

You're right, it wasn't Shapira, he was involved with other Moabite forgeries. I misread the account in the Jewish encyclopedia of Shapira. The french archaeologist involved only announced it to the world. The stone was found in 1868 and different accounts credit German missionaries, bedouins, and the french fellow.

here's the Wiki on the Mesha
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesha_Stele

• "The stele was discovered at the ancient Dibon now Dhiban, Jordan, in August 1868, by Rev. F. A. Klein, a German missionary in Jerusalem. "The Arabs of the neighborhood, dreading the loss of such a talisman, broke the stone into pieces; but a squeeze had already been obtained by [Charles] Clermont-Ganneau, and most of the fragments were recovered and pieced together by him"[1] (http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/). A squeeze is a papier-mache impression. The squeeze and the reassembled stele are now in the Louvre Museum."

The Scientific American supplements from 1883 are online at ProjGutenburg

http://www2.cddc.vt.edu/gutenberg/et...040110h.htm#25

• "The Moabite pottery which reached Europe through Mr. Shapira's agency and is deposited in the Museum at Berlin is now commonly regarded as a modern forgery; but of this forgery, if it be one, it is asserted that Mr. Shapira was the dupe and not the accomplice. The leathern fragments now produced by Mr. Shapira were, as he alleges, obtained by him from certain Arabs near Dibon, the neighborhood where the Moabite stone was discovered. The agent employed by him in their purchase was an Arab "who would steal his mother-in-law for a few piastres," and who would probably be even less scrupulous about a few blackened slips of ancient or modern sheepskin. The value placed by Mr. Shapira on the fragments is, however, a cool million sterling, and at this price they are offered to the British Museum, where they have been temporarily deposited for examination."

BTW, when you look at Mesha, doesn't your BS sensor start signalling a five-alarm fire? Mine does. An unprovenanced artifact dramatically broken by superstitious arabs who consider it a talisman - sooooo romantic! -- and then followed by a string of Moabite forgeries. From what I can understand from the entry in the Jewish Encyclopedia, it looks like Shapira was already in-country long before Mesha was found. I'll bet if we look into his early career he had already begun to be a purveyor of forgeries, at least to friends in a small and informal way. It looks like the Moabite stele was created to provide a background to the forgeries, at least from this angle.

One problematic for this is the El Kerak Stele. Andrew, you don't happen to know how the language of one relates to the language of the other, do you?

Vorkosigan

andrewcriddle

Given that a 'squeeze' had been taken before the stele was broken I don't think its subsequent breaking really bears on authenticity.

For Shapira to have himself devised the script used on the Mesha Stele is IMO highly unlikely, copying such a script in subsequent forgeries presents much less difficulty.

I have no particular knowledge of the El-Kerak Stele but IMVHO the surviving text is so short that it may limit the opportunities for comparison.

Andrew Cridddle

Haran

I believe that the following is the El Kerak inscription referred to:

K. C. Hanson's page - El Kerak (translation is still wrong, by the way - sorry just noted you already posted this link...)
WSRP - El Kerak

For comparison: Mesha Stele

I'm not even going to venture a guess as to whether it was forged or not. At this point, it is beginning to seem frustratingly like much of Hebrew palaeography is hopelessly corrupt. I hope that is a misconception.

I'll take a crack at that. I do believe they're the same, ie. moabite. Is there something deeper you're asking?

Vorkosigan

That is the yawning gulf I was peering into.

Yeah, sort of, is one radically divergent from the other?