From clay to cash
In this picture, the modern forgery lies comfortably next to the real letter of thousands of years old. It’s by no means an unusual situation: there are multiple other known examples of fake clay tablets in antiquities collections.
In the case of clay tablets, we can distinguish between forgeries from ancient times and modern forgeries. We know these forgeries have always existed, because some cuneiform texts explicitly warned the reader about false documents that were going around. One of the methods used to prevent this was the use of sealed envelopes, like the ones we just studied. In ancient times, the most common motive to draw up false documents was getting rich - for instance by forging a confession.
Financial gain was the most important motive behind modern forgeries as well. Ever since the 19th century, there was an ever-growing interest in clay tablets, especially since the decipherment of cuneiform in 1857, and eventually, merchants started producing their own clay tablets as a result. Clay was cheap and widely available, so the threshold to start making your own tablets was low. Forging tablets took place mostly at the end of the 19th century and went on until well into the 1930s – the so-called ‘golden age of tablet forgeries’. Our tablet is probably from this period as well.
Forging tablets can be done by using several techniques. A real tablet can be copies sign by sign into new, fresh clay by hand. In this case whether or not the modern replica will turn out convincing depends heavily on the capacities of the copyist. A more efficient method is the use of a mould, based on an imprint of the original tablet. Such a mould usually consisted of two halves, made out of the front and the back of the tablet. These moulds were then filled with two pieces of soft clay, that were then glued together to form one single clay tablet. The results of this method can turn out believable, but the edges, where the two halves meet, usually give it away. A few years ago some important proof for this forging technique was found: in 2014, one half of a lead mould was excavated during field research in Turkey, probably created during the end of the 19th, or beginning of the 20th century, to fabricate false tablets.
In order to be profitable, these kinds of moulds were used multiple times. And so it sometimes occurs that exact replicas of clay tablets are found in separate museum collections across the world. Our example seems to be created by using a mould based not on an existing tablet, but someone’s own creation. The back is exactly the same as the front: both mere made using the same mould. So it seems our forger took the easy way out…