Title: Les fraudes archéologiques en Palestine Suivies de quelques monuments phéniciens apocryphe Avec 20 gravures et fac-similés Par Ch. Clermont-Ganneau Correspondant de l’Institut
Description: <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:11.5pt;">16mo. pp. 357. Contemporary half morocco, with 28 further pages of contemporary newspaper and journal clippings mounted on blank leaves at the end. Book label of the Society of Writers to His Majesty’s Signet on front pastedown.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:11.5pt;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:11.5pt;">Only edition, an account of genuine and fraudulent inscriptions discovered in and near Jerusalem, with special attention to Moses Wilhelm Shapira, a shady antiquities dealer of Jerusalem, who had certainly dealt with, and probably commissioned, Moabite inscriptional forgeries in the 1860s. Clermont-Ganneau had exposed these at the time, and when, two decades later, Shapira obtained, decoded, and attempted to sell to the British Museum (for one million pounds) what appeared to be the earliest known fragments of the Old Testament – supposedly discovered by Arab boys in caves near Jerusalem – he came forward again, and was successful in discrediting those as well. In consequent despair, Shapira committed suicide in 1884, and the fragments were sold for a pittance at Sotheby’s, passing later from Quaritch to a private collector, in whose library they seem to have perished by fire. But with the discovery in 1947 of the Dead Sea Scrolls, belief in the Shapira fragments has been restored in some quarters, along with a renewed search (fruitless, so far) for the originals.</span><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal;"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal;"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="https://catalyst.library.jhu.edu/catalog/bib_4655353" rel="ugc nofollow">Click here to view the Johns Hopkins University catalog record.</a></span></span></p>