This month Eberhard Zangger and Fred Woudhuizen publish details of an ancient document, the “Beyköy text”. It supports a controversial theory about the collapse of Bronze Age civilisations 3200 years ago – one of the most important events in prehistory. But other researchers are convinced the document is a fake. It is far from the first archaeological text to have been disputed. Here are three others that show it can be surprisingly hard to tell a hoax from the genuine article.
The Grolier Codex
In the 1960s, Michael Coe at Yale University heard that an antiquities collector from Mexico called Josué Sáenz had acquired a vanishingly rare Maya codex. One expert had already said it was fake, but Coe was convinced it was genuine.
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By 1971, the Grolier Codex was on public display in New York. Coe said he was willing to stake his reputation on its authenticity, and published an analysis of the codex. By then carbon dating had confirmed the pages dated back about 800 years. Coe insisted the content – a never-before-seen mix of Maya and non-Maya styles – sealed the matter, as a forger would not risk experimenting in such a way.
Others disagreed: the document was so confusing it would “make any Maya priest tear his long hair”, according to one researcher.
Many still say it’s a forgery. Last year Coe and his colleagues responded. Among other things, a 2007 chemical analysis suggests the blue pigment used contains palygorskite. This mineral was only identified as a component of Maya blue pigment in 1964, the team say. A 1960s forger would have to be very knowledgeable about the latest scientific findings to know to use it. They concluded the Grolier Codex is genuine – but the debate is not over.
Gospel of Jesus’s wife
In September 2012, Karen King at the Harvard Divinity School made international headlines by announcing the discovery of a document she dubbed “The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife”. It was a papyrus fragment with 14 lines of Coptic script – and referred to Jesus and his “wife”.
Many scholars sounded the alarm and one highlighted a typographical error that could be dated to a 2002 translation of another Coptic gospel. But after radiocarbon dating and ink analysis, King concluded in a peer-reviewed article that it was the real deal.
An investigation by journalist Ariel Sabar finally led King to think otherwise, however. Sabar tracked down the owner of the text, a former archaeology student called Walter Fritz. He said he had bought the papyrus from an East German defector but then could only provide a copy of a purchase order as evidence.
Conveniently, Sabar noted, both the defector and a scholar who had apparently studied the text were dead by then. Fritz eventually admitted that he probably had the skills to forge the document – though he still insisted he hadn’t. When King read Sabar’s report, published in The Atlantic, she accepted that the text is probably a forgery.
The Walam Olum
In 1836, Constantine Samuel Rafinesque published a translation of a series of wooden tablets covered in hieroglyphs. The “Walam Olum” was a history of the Lenape people of North America. Or so Rafinesque claimed: somehow he had lost the tablets, and his copies were the only record. Among other things, the translation tells of the Lenape reaching the Americas via the frozen Bering Strait.
Scholars expressed doubts, but as the years passed, the Walam Olum gained supporters. A 1950s report concluded it was authentic, and as recently as the 1980s several historians agreed.
But in the 1990s, David Oestreicher found turns of phrase that hinted the text had been conceived in English. Worse, he realised that the hieroglyphs were a mixture of ancient symbols from Egypt, China and America. Most researchers now consider the Walam Olum a hoax orchestrated by Rafinesque.
But there’s an epilogue. During the 20th century, evidence grew that early Americans did arrive by crossing the Bering Strait. Recent genetic studies concluded as much too. The idea had been speculative in Rafinesque’s day – but sometimes even a fraudulent text can inadvertently contain a kernel of truth.
This article appeared in print under the headline “The champion of World War Zero”
