“I afterwards learned the forger’s name, and that he lived in Baghdad, from an excavator who had been working in Mesopotamia. This man also forged cuneiform tablets, and I have seen examples of his work in other shops in Cairo besides the one I have mentioned. He first began his forgery of the cuneiform tablets by making moulds of the two sides, pressing clay into the moulds and sticking the two halves together before baking. These forgeries were always discernible by the shallowness of the little wedges of which the writing is composed. This seems to have been pointed out to him, for after a time he began going over these tablets with a pointed stick before baking, and thus deepening the wedges. Finally, with the practice thus gained, he even went so far as to copy tablets freehand; and I know of at least one large tablet in a European museum which he made freehand without any tablet to copy from. It has all the appearance of one of the great tablets from the temple at Telloh, but the writing has no meaning.” ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XII THE MAKERS AND SELLERS OF FORGED ANTIQUITIES AS I have already said, the majority of the makers of forged antiquities are to be found among the very adaptable “up-river men.” At Qus lives the maker of gold reproductions. Most of the wooden forgeries come from Gurna and the scarabs from Luxor. In the villages near to Deir-el-Bahari are made the porcelain vases and figures, whence come also the stone heads and statuettes. A number of composition figures are made in the Delta, and may be met with at Zagazig and Benha. A few years ago the forgers used to make and sell their own work, but now that they are becoming rich and rising in the social scale they are content to leave the selling part of the business to others and themselves stay at home to carry on the making of further imitations. In appearance they are tall, broad-shouldered men with keen, clever faces and long soft fingers, direct descendants of the ancient Egyptians, with very dark skins, thin lips and persuasive manners. One member of the family usually leaves his village in the month of October, and with his bundles of carefully wrapped up reproductions drifts lazily down the Nile on a trading boat. Arrived at Cairo, he takes up his quarters with a friend, and the next day may be seen in one of the principal streets with his hands full of strings of beads and his pockets bulging with some of the results of the summer’s work.