When a museum acquires a fake in archeology with full knowledge of the facts



Hirtius’ fake urn. – Department of the North – Ancient Forum of Bavay

  • The Bavay Ancient Forum bought a fake Roman antiquity.
  • The urn will be studied before it is likely to be displayed.
  • The Hauts-de-France has experienced some major episodes of counterfeiting in archeology.

The Urn of Hirtius is back ! Discovered in Bavay in 1834, this bronze urn contained the ashes of Hirtius, a relative of Cicero. In the second part of the nineteenth century, it had disappeared from circulation before being recently proposed by a consulting firm in the
Bavay ancient forum who bought it. Its last owner was a retired farmer.

Except that this urn is a fake. And the Ancient Forum knows it very well. The coat of arms, the representation of the character more Christic than Roman, the bucranes (ox skulls), an error in the Roman numerals prove the forgery, already suspected at the time. There is nothing antique about the urn, Hector Bochard, its so-called discoverer, had made a specialty of selling forgeries, allegedly found in Bavay. At the time, the northern city was the hub of counterfeit trafficking. Even a Prefect had been abused!

Even today, several museums in the region have fakes from Bavay, most often in the reserves. “Out of 60,000 objects, the Ancient Forum has about twenty doubtful rooms,” tempers Véronique Beirnaert-Mary, the director of the Ancient Forum. If we bought this piece, it was to study it, compare it to other questionable pieces to identify if they come from the same workshop, etc. Thus, we will be able to better understand archeology in Bavay in the nineteenth century ”

The affairs of the Somme

The history of Bavay bears witness to a reality inherent in archeology: fakes. The Hauts-de-France has known a few cases of the kind. The most resounding come from the Somme. In 1863, on the Moulin-Quignon site in a district of Abbeville, a worker from Jacques Boucher-de-Perthes’ team discovered a human mandible in a very old stratigraphic layer, containing cut flints. Except that it was a medieval jawbone, taken from a nearby cemetery, placed there intentionally to deceive.

In Amiens, a century later, another affair hit the headlines. At the end of 1987, two amateur prospectors sold statuettes to an antique dealer. They found them in the rubble of an excavation site carried out by a team of experienced archaeologists. From 6 to 47 centimeters, in chalk, some of these statuettes are human representations. Very crude or grotesque, they would have been cut in the third century. This affair will ignite the archaeologists until it is proved that these hundred statuettes had been made by their alleged discoverers.

The fakes at the museum

Height of the false: these glorious counterfeits are sometimes found in our museums. Thus, the Moulin-Quignon jaw was exhibited at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. The Boucher-de-Perthes museum in Abbeville also has in its reserves some allegedly prehistoric bifaces, but cut by amateurs in the nineteenth century who had grasped the financial benefit to be drawn from them. The Ancient Forum of Bavay plans to present the so-called Hirtius urn in a future exhibition route. Enough to give the fake a real historical value!



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