“The dealer, who had found this in what seemed to be an untouched tomb, now became thoroughly alarmed. At his request, his friend and the Egyptologist went to his house to inspect all the objects from the tomb. They were all forgeries, and the dealer had been swindled out of his £600 by a cleverly-planned trick of the west bank forgers.” * * * * * The Egyptians who are engaged in the making of spurious antiquities are now specialising. One man in Luxor has perfected the manufacture of glazed or faience vessels. Another at Qeneh has developed the cutting and inscription of stone scarabs. At Aboutig a forger makes woodwork and carved ivories, and somewhere in Egypt they are making stone vessels of all periods, apparently on a steam lathe, but copying the ancient forms with great success. A dealer in Cairo once showed me an enormous head of Amenemhat III., which he said was offered to him as coming from Tanis. This must have been the work of European stone-masons. It was cut from a single large boulder of sandstone, an exact copy of the existing portraits of that king, but the cutting had been done with modern stone-masons’ tools, the marks of which were plainly visible, even without a glass. “On another occasion,” Dr. Reisner tells us, “I was once looking through the stock of a dealer, now dead. Suddenly I caught sight in the back of a drawer of what appeared to be a Babylonian object. The dealer, who happened to know that I have some knowledge of Babylonian antiquities, was very reluctant to show me the object, protesting openly that it was a forgery. I persuaded him, however, and he produced a dozen or more very beautifully made Babylonian sculptures, but all perfectly impossible. He said that he received them from a Persian, an agent who came through Cairo every year, and left him a certain number of pieces to sell on commission. I tried to buy one of these pieces, offering even as high as £5 for it, against the £40 he demanded, but he refused. When I came back in the spring, he told me with a grin that he had sold them all at his own price to various travellers.