Illicit Antiquities
Research Centre
against the theft & traffic
of archaeology

Hatra statue and fakes

Augusta McMahon

We are indebted to Trudy Kawami for passing along this information and the images.

Culture Without Context

Issue 2,
Spring 1998

A group of four antiquities and alleged antiquities from the Near East offered for sale via Switzerland in recent years, have been brought to our attention. Two of the group are clearly fakes, but at least one (Fig. 1), a large torso section of a limestone statue of King Abdsamya, father of King Sanatruq (II), is genuine. The statue is known to come from Hatra in northern Iraq, and its inventory number is 8.H.247. Two more fragments of the lower portion of this statue are known but have not apparently appeared on the market. According to reports of the Department of Antiquities in Iraq, Hatra has been looted a number of times in the last five years, and several other statues and reliefs stolen from the site have been successfully retrieved by Iraqi officials. 

Figure 1: Genuine torso of statue of King Abdsamya, from Hatra in northern Iraq Return to text

Of the three pieces offered together with the Hatra statue, one, a rectangular relief with three standing frontal male figures and a Palmyrene inscription along the base (Fig. 2), may be genuine. The head of the central figure is surrounded by a corona of rays which may mark him as the god Aglibol, and he is flanked by two figures wearing helmets and carrying shields. The arrangement of the scene, the placement of the inscription, and the details and proportions of the figures look for the most part correct and typical of Palmyrene artworks. Similar architectural reliefs with comparable scenes have been found in Syria at Palmyra and Dura Europus, among other sites. But a few minor details arouse suspicion, such as the scarf-like arrangement around the necks of the figures, where a fastened cloak would be more typical. And more difficult to overlook is the apparently total absence of damage to any of the figures and to the frame which surrounds them. The relief has an air of having been only recently carved.

Figure 2: Palmyrene relief copy (?) Return to text

The third, an irregular relief fragment (Fig. 3), is almost certainly a fake. It is very similar to the third register of the Middle Elamite Untash-napirisha stele from Susa (SW Iran), dating to the fourteenth century BC (see Harper et al. 1992, The Royal City of Susa, Ancient Treasures in the Louvre, no 80). The relevant section of the genuine stele has a similar fish-tailed figure holding nearly identical streams of water, framed on the right by a snake and at the top and bottom by horizontal bands decorated with a guilloche pattern. In the case of the piece offered for sale, the guilloche band at the top has been replaced with a pattern of chevrons, perhaps borrowed from the fourth register of the actual object, where this design appears on a tree trunk. Above that band there is a partial cuneiform inscription, while there are human figures in the comparable register on the genuine piece. There are also two more partial cuneiform inscriptions to the right of the snake on the item offered for sale. These inscriptions are very convincing and have been copied extremely carefully from an original, perhaps from the same stele as the figure. The poses of the fish-tailed figures on the two objects are identical, and there are vases placed along the streams of water at the same points, but the head of the figure on the piece on the market is far too large for the body, and the incised details of the snake's scales seem too sloppy. If this item is a fake, as seems very likely, it is still instructive to note the effort which has been expended upon it and the type of object being copied.

The final piece is even more clearly a fake, a rectangular slab with six lines of inscription above and surrounding a box in which is a solar disk symbol, with wavy lines at the base (Fig. 4). The placement of these elements is unconvincing, though they are at least Mesopotamian in inspiration; and more obviously, the inscription is a very poor copy of the first six lines of the third (and final) column of the stone tablet of the Babylonian king Nabu-apla-iddina (from Sippar and now in the British Museum; published inter alia D. Collon 1995, Ancient Near Eastern Art, fig. 135). The decorative parts of this piece come from the same stone tablet, which has a solar disk in a prominent position and a wavy line base for the figural scene at the top. The selection of the lines of inscription at the upper right of the original point to the forgery probably having been made by an individual accustomed to reading from right to left.

Figure 4: Copy of Nabu-apla-iddina tablet Return to text

It is interesting that this group of objects included both a genuine artefact and some probably and some definite forgeries. It can be assumed that different sets of people are responsible for stealing genuine items and for creation of fakes, yet the conduit which places both on the market is, at least in this case, the same. And the effort expended on creation of the fakes has been considerable. The genuine pieces being quoted are not copied faithfully, yet the source is clear enough to be identified in two cases, as the fakes have mostly mixed together intact elements from the originals. In both these cases, the originals are well-published, the tablet being quite widely cited in easily available books on Near Eastern art, while the stele is slightly more obscure but has also been published in clear photographs.

First posted October 1998;  Page design updated September 2006