Introduction
“Old collections” have long been recognized as a significant phenomenon by researchers of art and antiquities crime. The invention of old collections, at least in the art market, was already considered “among the hoariest dodges” of the trade more than half a century ago.Footnote 1 In fact, the “old collection” serves multiple functions for dealers and collections. Besides ostensibly assuring legality or authenticity, it can also add prestige – and therefore value – to items on the market or in collections. Despite these important roles, however, there is to my knowledge no general study of the use of the label and of the concept generally by dealers and collectors.
The current article is intended as a beginning toward that goal. In it, I will consider the case of one such old collector – the Englishman Cumberland Clark, who appears as one of the main sources of the cuneiform tablets currently owned by the Norwegian collector Martin Schøyen.Footnote 2 I will begin by discussing Clark’s biography and what we know of his collecting activities. I will then turn to the role that his cuneiform collection has played in legitimizing items in the Schøyen Collection and other present-day collections. I will demonstrate that at least one of the provenance documents used to show the link of present-day collections to Cumberland Clark is a forgery and argue that the Clark provenance has been constructed to launder recently looted tablets. Finally, I will try to draw some lessons from the Cumberland Clark case to understand the use of the concept “old collection” more broadly, including how and why specific old collectors are chosen for this role in laundering antiquities.
Cumberland Clark’s Life and Career
Cumberland Clark (1862–1941) was born into a wealthy family in Kensington, London; his father was a solicitor who was able to retire early.Footnote 3 In his early adulthood Clark went abroad, the start of “nearly twenty years’ experience of life and travel in our Colonies and Dominions,” as he would later boast, mostly in Australia.Footnote 4 After his return around 1900, he settled back in Kensington and married Elizabeth Caroline Robertina Waterhouse; they had no children. Initially working as a clerk, by 1911 he was a man of “private means” – perhaps because of the inheritance received after the death of his father in 1902.Footnote 5
From the late 1910s until his death, Clark gained attention as a prolific lecturer and writer. He was variously a journalist, playwright, and lyricist. But his literary reputation, such as it was, rested primarily on some 70 books and booklets that he authored.Footnote 6 Most of these fall under three topics: literary history and criticism, especially of Dickens and Shakespeare; the British Empire and its colonies; and songbooks. While his studies of literature are still quoted periodically, even in their time his books were not generally popular.Footnote 7 To the extent that he is still remembered, he is “arguably Britain’s most excruciatingly awful poet” or “the second-worst poet in the English language.”Footnote 8 Surprisingly, given that he was a collector, Clark seems to have written only rarely on antiquarian issues. The main product of this interest was one of his last works, The Art of Early Writing. Footnote 9 Beyond this, Clark apparently authored a pamphlet on the Warwick Vase (an ancient marble vase from Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli) and a book on the history of Egypt that may never have been published.Footnote 10
Cumberland Clark as a Collector
Clark’s first public appearance as a collector was as a coin collector in his late 40s. In 1911 and 1912 he joined the Royal Numismatic Society and the British Numismatic Society.Footnote 11 In the following two years, he appears to have taken a regular part in the activities of these societies: he sometimes presented items from his collection and gave lectures on them, and he donated to the British Numismatic Society’s Research Fund.Footnote 12 Then, in early 1914, he sold two large collections of coins (one classical and one English) via Sotheby, Wilkinson & Hodge and withdrew his membership in the two numismatic societies.Footnote 13 There is no evidence that he collected coins again in the last 37 years of his life. Around this time Clark also collected stone tools: in February 1914 he sold a collection of them, also via Sotheby, Wilkinson, & Hodge, but I am not aware of any further information on how he formed this collection.Footnote 14
In the mid-1910s, Clark appears to have shifted his collecting activities to literary paraphernalia. In particular, he collected portraits of Shakespearean actors and unpublished Dickens manuscripts – correspondence as well as unpublished essays.Footnote 15 Between 1918 and 1926 he authored nine works on Dickens (one of these jointly on Shakespeare & Dickens). Most of these were publications of the unpublished manuscripts in his collection combined with commentary, varying in length from pamphlets to short books. But by 1926, he had sold (or given) his Dickens library to the bookseller Charles J. Sawyer,Footnote 16 and published nothing more on Dickens. Instead, he began to concentrate on Shakespeare. Having already published two works on Shakespeare (including Shakespeare & Dickens), he would now write some 15 books on the playwright between 1926 and 1940. In this period, he served as Vice-President of the Shakespeare Reading Society and was a member of the Dugdale Society, dedicated to publishing historical texts from Warwickshire (the county that includes Shakespeare’s birthplace, Stratford-upon-Avon).Footnote 17
Besides coins and stone tools, the only other antiquities Clark appears to have collected are cuneiform tablets. The sole published source for this activity is Clark’s Reference Clark1938 book The Art of Early Writing, in which he dedicates a chapter to his own collection. According to Clark, his collection included “many cylinders, tablets, bricks, and fragments” from the Sumerian period to the Neo-Babylonian; among these, he also singles out Assyrian prisms.Footnote 18 However, he provides detailed descriptions and photographs of only four specific items: an inscription of Nammaḫani of Lagash, an Ur III cone, and two royal inscriptions of Nebuchadnezzar II.Footnote 19 In this chapter, Clark gives essentially no information on how he formed this collection; and in the preface, he writes only that he had started collecting cuneiform tablets “many years ago.”Footnote 20
From the above we can begin to form a profile of Clark’s collecting habits: it appears that he would focus intensely on one specific field for a few years, after which he would abandon it, sell off or give away his collection, and move to another field. Clark’s statement about “many years” might suggest that his cuneiform tablets were an exception to that tendency, though it is not clear how many years Clark had in mind with this vague phrase.
Documents on Clark’s Cuneiform Collection
Recently, the Schøyen Collection circulated provenance documentation that could potentially shine a light on Clark’s collecting of tablets. Some background is necessary: In August 2021, the Norwegian government seized 83 objects from the collection of Martin Schøyen, after a request from the government of Iraq. Most of these were cuneiform tablets. The Museum of Cultural History of the University of Oslo was tasked with investigating the seized items; its report, issued in March 2022, concluded that most of the items originated in Iraq and, as there was no documentation of legal export and the items first appeared on the market in the late 1980s and 1990s, should be returned to Iraq.Footnote 21 In response, Schøyen’s lawyer Cato Schiøtz wrote a letter to the museum on July 1, 2022, insisting that the report was in error, and offering a series of documents to prove that the items had been out of Iraq long before the 1990s – and that they (or many of them) had once been part of the collection of Cumberland Clark. There were two documents specifically tied to Clark, both dated to 1921: a letter from the antiquities dealer Ibrahim Elias Géjou to Clark, offering two boxes of tablets from Warka (ancient Uruk) and Bismya (ancient Adab) for sale (Fig. 1); and a note from the Assyriologist Theophilus Pinches, then of University College London, inventorying a set of 25 tablets that Clark had acquired from Géjou (Fig. 2).Footnote 22
Table 1. Schøyen Collection items attributed to Cumberland Clark where provenance is given in multiple sources (sources: Museum of Cultural History 2022; old Schøyen Collection webpage on National Library website, archived at Internet Archive https://web.archive.org/web/20040215100113/http://www.nb.no/baser/schoyen/contentnew3.html)
Figure 1. Letter of I. E. Géjou to Cumberland Clark provided by Schiøtz (courtesy of the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Culture)
Figure 2. Note on C[umberland] C[lark]’s Tablets by Theophilus Pinches provided by Schiøtz (courtesy of the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Culture)
These documents would seem to provide important new evidence on Clark’s collecting activities and on the collection history of cuneiform tablets now in the Schøyen Collection. A closer look at them, however, reveals some problems. First, as pointed out by archaeologist Christopher Prescott in his response to Schiøtz, Schiøtz makes inflated claims about what exactly the documents show.Footnote 23 According to Schiøtz and Schøyen, the documents prove that Géjou was Clark’s main supplier of tablets, including the 925 objects in the Schøyen Collection said to come from Clark’s collection.Footnote 24 But, at most, the Géjou letter and the Pinches note attest to the fact that Clark made one purchase of 25 tablets from Géjou. The other documentation shows that, over 60 years later, a dealer claimed that hundreds of tablets sold and traded to Schøyen had come from Clark’s collection, but with no proof of the relevant transaction – the sale of tablets by Cumberland Clark’s heirs to the dealer in question, Mark Wilson – or that the tablets had been inherited from Clark decades earlier.
But there are additional problems. Géjou was a major dealer of all sorts of Iraqi antiquities; he sold more than 17,000 cuneiform tablets to the British Museum alone.Footnote 25 In 1920 – one year before the date of the documents – the British Museum purchased 25 tablets from Warka and Bismya from Géjou.Footnote 26 The combination of the number of tablets from the Pinches note and the sites from the Géjou-Clark letter is striking, especially since – while Géjou often sold material from Warka – this is the only known sale Géjou made of tablets from Bismya. Beyond this, the Géjou-Clark letter is suspiciously close in several respects to typed letters from Géjou to Wallis Budge in the British Museum archives dating to 1920. The 25 tablets from Warka and Bismya are offered in a letter of January 17, 1920.Footnote 27 The phrasings of the letter, meanwhile, copy to an unusual extent those in a letter of February 14, 1920;Footnote 28 the typed date on the Géjou-Clark letter also seems to be modeled on the February 14, 1920, letter to Budge, including the use of a hyphen between the day and the year (“February 14 - 1920”), which is unparalleled in Géjou’s other letters in this period. Most revealing of all, however, is the signature of the Géjou-Clark letter: it is an exact copy of the signature on another of Géjou’s letters to Budge, dated February 24, 1920 ( Figs 3 - 5 ).Footnote 29 As signatures are never identical, this is definitive proof that the Géjou-Clark letter is a forgery, modeled on a few different letters from Géjou to Budge in the British Museum archives.Footnote 30
Figure 3. Letter of I. E. Géjou to E. A. Wallis Budge, February 24, 1920 (copyright Trustees of the British Museum)
Figure 4a. Géjou signature from letter to Budge (fig. 3)
Figure 4b. Géjou signature from letter to Clark (fig. 1)
Figure 5. Overlay of two Géjou signatures
Figure 6. Notary’s statement provided by Schiøtz (courtesy of the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Culture)
The Géjou-Clark letter appears merely as a poor photocopy or fax, but it – alone among the provenance documentation provided by Schiøtz with his July 1, 2022 letter – is accompanied by a separate statement from a notary dated May 2004, stating that he had seen the originals of documents marked “A” provided by Mark Wilson (Fig. 6). The Géjou-Clark letter is indeed marked “A,” but as the letter itself is not notarized, and the letter is not described in the statement, we have no way to know whether the notary saw this specific document, or if the letter was simply marked “A” separately to make it appear that the notary had seen it. At the bottom of the notary’s statement, there is a handwritten line “Letter to Clark from Géjou, Paris, 15.2.1921”; however, this appears to be in the dealer Wilson’s hand and could have been added at any time. As the statement attests to documents (plural), there must have been one or more other documents marked with “A” in any case; yet only one is listed in this handwritten line.
Nor does the other document, the Pinches note, withstand scrutiny. The only connection of this note to Cumberland Clark is a sentence written in a different hand near the top. Again, we have only a poor photocopy or fax, which makes it difficult to distinguish the details of the note. Based on the angle of the horizontal line running below this note, however, it appears that this sentence was originally on a separate sheet of paper. The note itself, in other words, includes no connection to Clark.Footnote 31 Meanwhile, the text “Tablets from Géjou” at the end of the note may also be written in a different hand, so it is unclear whether it was originally part of the note. Thus, none of Schiøtz’s documentation can be tied to Clark in any way, as the only direct connection is a forged letter.
Altered Provenances
Further problems with the Cumberland Clark provenance appear in an analysis of the provenance entries provided by the Schøyen Collection for its cuneiform tablets and other inscriptions. The Schøyen Collection website features information for a selection of its items. The current version of the collection’s website (https://www.schoyencollection.com) does not provide provenance information in most of its collection entries, particularly not for Mesopotamian inscriptions. Previously, however, the Schøyen Collection website was hosted by the National Library of Norway (https://www.nb.no), where entries typically featured provenance information until that information was systematically removed over the course of 2004.Footnote 32 The pages of this version of the website were cached several times by the Internet Archive (https://archive.org). In addition, provenance information is provided in the Schøyen Collection’s published checklists from the late 1990s, though these publish only a selection of items then accessioned. Such information is also included in the collection’s comprehensive private catalog; while this catalog has not been made publicly available, its provenance entries for a number of items are cited in the Museum of Cultural History’s 2022 report.
Årstein Justnes and Josephine Munch Rasmussen have already demonstrated that the provenances for dubious Dead Sea Scroll fragments in the Schøyen Collection displayed on the collection website were changed often.Footnote 33 Normally, we would expect such changes relatively rarely, reflecting the discovery of new information about the collection history.Footnote 34 However, Justnes and Rasmussen show the changes are more frequent, with new additions sometimes reflecting information supposedly known long before. The changes, then, appear more like an attempt to make the provenances seem more convincing and to extend the chain of custody further back in time. The same is true of the Cumberland Clark provenance. I have identified six items from the collection for which we have multiple published sources on provenance in which at least one source attributes the item to Cumberland Clark (see Table 1). In every case, the different available sources provide conflicting provenance information. Moreover, Cumberland Clark does not appear in any published source before early 2004. It is noteworthy that the items in question generally appear on the Schøyen Collection website in 2001 or 2002, all with provenances that are inferior to the Cumberland Clark provenances: they do not cite documented collectors and do not extend as far back in time. This fact is especially odd when we consider attachments 5 and 9 from Schiøtz’s July 1, 2022 letter to the Museum of Cultural History.Footnote 35 These attachments, dated 1989 and 1994, list Cumberland Clark as a major source of tablets that Wilson sold to or traded with Schøyen in those years. Based on these documents, then, the Schøyen Collection would have known of the Cumberland Clark provenance for each item in the table in the late 1980s or early 1990s but would have suppressed that information for an inferior provenance until 2004. However, since we can now prove that the Géjou-Clark letter attached to the July 1, 2022 letter is a forgery, we can no longer consider the other attachments reliable sources. The likeliest explanation for the facts above, then, is that the Cumberland Clark provenance was invented in early 2004. (Note that this would also coincide with the date on the notary’s statement attached to the forged Géjou-Clark letter.)
It is also noteworthy that the claimed provenances from the website and catalog are generally ignored in the Schøyen Collection publications, as if the scholars suspect, or even assume, that they are unreliable. These claimed provenances appear only in the general Statements of Provenance at the beginning of the Manuscripts in the Schøyen Collection, Cuneiform Texts volumes. In fact, some publications contradict the Statement of Provenance by explicitly stating that many or most of the tablets published in the volume were definitely or probably looted recently.Footnote 36 One of the artifacts in the table above, MS 2855, is discussed in the Museum of Cultural History report and published by Friberg. As the report indicates, while Friberg explicitly notes when tablets can be documented in an older collection, there is no such indication given for MS 2855 – implying that scholars believe it was recently looted.Footnote 37 Rüdiger Schmitt, who studied the Artaxerxes alabastron MS 4536/2 (a companion of the Xerxes alabastron MS 4536/1 from the Table) also suggested that it had been recently looted.Footnote 38
Other Cumberland Clark Collections
There are two other present-day collections of cuneiform tablets that include items attributed to Cumberland Clark, both currently held by the University of California, Los Angeles:Footnote 39
-
1. In 2007, an anonymous donor gifted UCLA a group of 25 tablets, asking that the group be called the “Cumberland Clark Cuneiform Tablet Collection.” The tablets are described as school exercises, mostly dating to the Old Babylonian period.Footnote 40 Again, the reoccurrence of the number 25 is striking.
-
2. In 2011, the Cotsen Family Foundation donated 215 tablets, mostly Old Babylonian school exercises, to UCLA; this group is known as the Lloyd E. Cotsen Cuneiform Tablets Collection. According to the UCLA webpage for this collection, it was formed by Cotsen over the course of “several decades.”Footnote 41 However, Gabriella Spada reported (based on personal communication with an unspecified person, presumably at UCLA or the Cotsen Foundation) that most of the collection was formed from two previous collections – the larger one attributed to Cumberland Clark, the smaller to a man named Douglas S. Sharp – and that both were bought in 2002.Footnote 42 Most of these tablets (189 of 215) were published in 2008 by the dealer Mark Wilson.Footnote 43 In his book, Wilson confirms that most of the tablets derive from two private collections. Though the two collectors are not named, they are described sufficiently so that we can identify them: one collection is attributed to “a writer and traveler who died in 1944 in the United Kingdom,” who fits the profile of Cumberland Clark (except that Clark died in 1941); the other, “obtained by a previous owner in Palestine shortly after the close of the Second World War, which then became part of a private collection of miscellaneous antiquities in England,” fits the description of Leonard Simmonds and his son Douglas Simmonds – not Sharp – whom the Schøyen Collection identifies as another of its main sources of cuneiform tablets.Footnote 44
Thus, both collections at UCLA appear to have close ties to the Schøyen tablets: all first appear publicly around the same time (mostly in the late 1990s or 2000s), are comprised of similar types of tablets (including many Old Babylonian school tablets), and are attributed to some of the same older collections. In addition, at least two of the collections are connected to Mark Wilson.
There is another point of connection: the Cotsen Collection and the Schøyen Collection each have several tablets from the ancient site Dur-Abieshuh (Dūr-Abī-ešuḫ). This provenance is a red flag. The ancient name of the site is used because its modern identification is unknown to scholarship, though it is known to be somewhere in southern Iraq, probably in the general area of Nippur (Arabic Nuffar). While the existence of this place has been known for many decades, as it is found in a year-name of its namesake, Abieshuh, an Old Babylonian king (and grandson of Hammurabi), tablets from this site first started to appear on the market only in 1998, with most coming up for sale after 2001.Footnote 45 All known examples appear in recent collections – the Cotsen Collection, the Schøyen Collection, the former Rosen Collection at Cornell, and some smaller collections,Footnote 46 with no examples known in the large public or private collections formed in the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries. Thus it has become the consensus of Assyriologists that the site was discovered by looters in the mid- to late 1990s, and the tablets were illegally removed from Iraq after that date.Footnote 47 Notably, some of the Dur-Abieshuh tablets in the Schøyen Collection are attributed to Cumberland Clark;Footnote 48 of course, it is impossible that a collector who died in 1941 acquired tablets from a site that was only discovered in the 1990s.
Synthesis
Based on this evidence, it is likely that all Cumberland Clark provenances cited by current collections are fabricated.Footnote 49 The different collections appear to be connected, meaning that this provenance was likely fabricated by a single person or group of persons working together. The evidence suggests that this fabrication occurred in early 2004: that is when entries on the Schøyen Collection website were changed to include Cumberland Clark, and these entries are the earliest public record of the provenance.Footnote 50 The date of the notary’s statement also falls in this period, suggesting that the forged Géjou letter was likely created at this time.
Why then? In late 2003 and early 2004, following the US-led invasion of Iraq (and the widespread reports of looting of archaeological sites in the aftermath), Norwegian media increasingly raised questions about the legality of Schøyen’s ownership of much of his material: in Museumsnytt, Leif Anker interviewed a police attorney, Hans Tore Høviskeland, who suggested that violating the UN Security Council resolution was punishable by fine or imprisonment up to three years; and the Norwegian public broadcaster NRK was preparing an investigation of the Schøyen Collection (Skriftsamleren, “The Manuscript Collector,” aired in two parts in September 2004) for its documentary series Brennpunkt.Footnote 51 While the documentary focused on two other sub-collections in the Schøyen Collection (the so-called “Dead Sea Scrolls of Buddhism” and Aramaic incantation bowls), it brought serious attention to the question of provenance in general.
The motivation seems clear enough. The tablets attributed to Cumberland Clark were probably looted from Iraq in the 1990s and early 2000s (this is certain for those tablets from Dur-Abieshuh). Unlike the original provenances provided for these tablets, the Cumberland Clark provenance ties them to a known collector, one who serves to extend the collection histories of the tablets – and particularly the date at which they were out of their source country – further back in time, prior not only to the 1990 UN Security Council resolution barring trade in Iraqi antiquities removed after that date, but also to Iraq’s antiquities laws of 1924 and 1936.Footnote 52
Conclusion
Old collections are a critical part of provenance entries for art and antiquities collections. They are displayed prominently in catalogues, with attention drawn to the names of especially famous or important collectors of the past. Their presence serves multiple functions. They allow present-day collectors to represent themselves as the latest link in a chain of great collectors, taking for themselves part of the reflected glory of these past figures. They also provide a measuring stick for present-day collectors, who can boast that their collections rival or even surpass the major collections of the past. Nor is this a matter of merely cultural capital. Associating art or antiquities with famous collectors of the past can add monetary value to those items.Footnote 53 This applies even to forgeries. Over the last 60 years, for example, fakes sold by the nineteenth-century Jerusalem dealer Moses Shapira have become fashionable collectors’ items, leading to an apparent rise in fake Shapira fakes.Footnote 54
We see these trends with the Schøyen Collection itself. The Statements of Provenance at the beginning of the Manuscripts in the Schøyen Collection, Cuneiform Texts volumes state that “it would not have been possible to collect such a great number of tablets and of such major textual importance, if the undertaking had not been based on the endeavour of some of the greatest collectors in earlier times.”Footnote 55 The collection’s checklists refer to “six great MS collectors that have been mentors of The Schøyen Collection” (Thomas Phillipps, Chester Beatty, Martin Bodmer, Lord Amherst, the Erlenmeyers, and Bernard Rosenthal).Footnote 56 Schøyen has repeatedly highlighted his acquisition of more than 1,000 items from Phillipps’s collection.Footnote 57 These collectors may have been Schøyen’s mentors, but his publications also highlight when his collection has outdone them. In comparison to Sir Thomas Phillipps’s famous bibliomania, we read that the Schøyen Collection is “far more discriminating as to the collecting fields and quality” and has “a much greater proportion of early material.”Footnote 58 Schøyen has shown special pride in collecting fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls – something he referred to as “the ultimate challenge” – and has noted that “[n]one of the great manuscript collectors of the time, such as Martin Bodmer and Chester Beatty, had succeeded in acquiring any fragments from the Judaean Desert.”Footnote 59
Clark, by contrast, adds no such prestige value. He is little remembered today, as either an author or a collector. Instead, as argued above, his role should be seen in terms of adding the veneer of legality. Old collections play an important role in establishing both the authenticity and legality of collected art and antiquities.Footnote 60 As we have seen, being able to trace antiquities back to past collections pushes the date back when they were removed from their source countries. Thus, it can be argued that they were removed before international agreements (such as the 1970 UNESCO Convention), recent policies of museums and professional organizations concerning ethical collecting and publication practices, or even national antiquities laws in the source countries. Not surprisingly, then, old collections are often used fraudulently to launder stolen antiquities.
Invented old collections take many forms. They can be anonymous, such as the fabled “anonymous Swiss collector,”Footnote 61 or named. If named, they may be real collections extended to include items never originally part of them, or completely fabricated collections. Anonymous and made-up collections both save the trouble of providing too much information and eliminate the risk of contradicting known details of well-known collections. We see examples of fictional old collections not only in the art world but also with ancient manuscripts (such as the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife, where fake documents tied it to a Hans-Ulrich Laukamp, a deceased acquaintance of the likely forger who had never been a collector) and other kinds of antiquities (the “Thomas Alcock” collection of Egyptian antiquities fabricated by Jonathan Tokeley-Parry).Footnote 62 In our example, Cumberland Clark was a real collector, but, nevertheless, was an effective choice: little is known about his collecting activities, in particular his collecting cuneiform tablets. The single published piece of evidence, the chapter from his 1938 book, discusses only four items in detail. Further, he provides no information about when he acquired any of the tablets, from whom, and so on. This makes the Cumberland Clark collection a blank slate for fabricators of provenance.
The Cumberland Clark case is noteworthy for its use of forged provenance documentation to support it. Forged provenance documentation is well attested in the trade of modern art, in order to launder forgeries, but it also occurs in the antiquities trade – often in the form of fake or falsified import and export documentation or falsified dealer registers. In addition, the phenomenon of apparently authentic documents used to launder originally unrelated antiquities is well-attested.Footnote 63 The forgery of historic documents to provide a fake provenance for antiquities, while perhaps rarer, is also attested.Footnote 64 The Clark case is unusual, however, in that it involves forgery based on documents in a museum archive. In the art trade, we can point to a case such as the forger John Myatt, whose paintings were laundered by forged provenance documentation inserted by the con man John Drewe in several reputable archives in London.Footnote 65 The Cumberland Clark provenance involves nothing so elaborate. However, the forging of a letter from a known dealer to a known collector of antiquities is noteworthy; I am not aware of the exact parallels. The fact that, in our case, both figures are known explains why the forger copied authentic letters in an archive, as it would be necessary to make the forgery believable.
The Cumberland Clark case is also noteworthy for being an example of forged documents for looted Mesopotamian antiquities; the parallel cases that are usually cited involve Egyptian or classical artifacts. The absence of examples of forged provenance documentation for Mesopotamian antiquities – and their relative rarity with other kinds of antiquities – can be easily explained: provenance documents are not generally seen as necessary by either buyers or sellers. It is rare to find any statement of provenance at all (beyond a generic region or country of origin) in either the offer of objects for sale or the exhibition of items purchased on the market, whether these items are classical, Mesoamerican, Southeast Asian, or other.Footnote 66 Often the only information is cultural or stylistic attribution, to obscure the specific national origin of the object.Footnote 67 Neil Brodie has shown that dealers of Mesopotamian antiquities, too, tend to use generic country or regional designations, with a complete provenance of usually no more than a single word; they take care only to avoid the term “Iraq,” as this might bring attention to legal issues (including, in the past, a UN Security Council resolution).Footnote 68
If provenance statements are typically unnecessary, then there is even less need for provenance documentation. Thus, with cuneiform tablets as with other antiquities, documentation tends to emerge only when questions of legality are raised. As we have seen, the Géjou-Clark letter may have been forged in 2004, when Norwegian media had begun asking questions about the ownership of many items in the Schøyen Collection; and it was presented to the Museum of Cultural History in 2022, after the museum report questioned the ownership of many cuneiform tablets. And so, the lesson is clear: as long as the trade in cuneiform tablets and other Mesopotamian antiquities remains relatively unregulated, we should expect to see little forged provenance documentation relating to old collections – because we should expect to see little provenance documentation at all.
Acknowledgment
This article resulted from my involvement with the project The Lying Pen of Scribes: Manuscript Forgeries, Digital Imaging, and Critical Provenance Research (RCN FRIPRO Toppforsk 2019-2024). I am grateful to the project manager, Årstein Justnes, for his support. Årstein, Josephine Munch Rasmussen, Håkon Roland, and Fabian von Harling all provided valuable advice along the way. I am thankful for research assistance from Morag Kersel, Matthew Suriano, Joseph Scales, Matthew Monger, and Hilda Deborah. Both Morag and Årstein provided helpful comments on a draft of the article, as did two anonymous reviewers for IJCP. Thanks also go to Egil Thorsås (Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs), Elizabeth Bray (BM images), and the staff of the library at the University of Agder (Kristiansand, Norway) for their assistance. Special thanks are due to Nadia Ait-Said Ghanem for providing me with initial copies of Ibrahim Elias Géjou’s letters to Wallis Budge and discussing them with me. Above all, I express my utmost appreciation to Christopher Prescott, who not only made valuable comments on a draft of the article but also provided advice and support throughout the process of writing it. Without his assistance, this article would not have been possible.
Open access
