No traces, no text

The diagonal chiselling traces that often remained around the carved-out figures in ancient Egyptian reliefs (Fig. 1), cannot be found here. Also, you can see here how the figure was carved out in an unusually high relief. There are no other things pictured around the figure.

It’s especially striking that there is no sign of the hieroglyphs you would expect on authentic reliefs on this fragment (Fig. 2). They were most likely left out because of the forger’s lack of knowledge of ancient Egyptian language. The missing hieroglyphs are typical for forged ancient Egyptian pieces of art. Forgers also tend to mess up the smaller details, proven by the necklace discussed in the next step.