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Saitaphernes' Golden Tiara

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Silas
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« on: December 07, 2009, 12:48:19 am »

In 1903, the newspaper Le Matin published a letter by a Russian jeweler named Lifschitz, who said he witnessed a friend named Israel Rouchomovski making the tiara. The artist, from a small town near Odessa, was brought to Paris. When questioned by the Louvre, he claimed Hochmann tricked him into making the phony crown and that he had not known its real purpose. Hochmann, he said, had asked him to make a tiara as a gift "for an archaeologist friend" and gave him books showing Greco-Scythian artifacts on which to base the work. Rouchomovski pointed out the exact books (Bilder-Atlas für Weltgeschichte and Antiquités de la Russsie Méridionale) to the investigators and described how he made it in three parts that he soldered. He was then given a sheet of gold and asked to prove his skill before they accepted his story. He did and they did.

Taken by the desire to acquire the tiara, the Louvre had missed warning signs that could have saved them considerable embarrassment. The tiara was flawed: there were traces of modern tools, there was modern soldering (though cleverly concealed), and an inscription was raised in relief. And then there was the preservation, ridiculed in a World Today article in 1907:

    There are a lot on indentations on the tiara and these furnish a comical note in this affair. They were supposed to have been caused by the falling of stones of the mouldering tomb. These stones certainly possessed a rare and discriminating appreciation of art, since they had avoided falling on any of the numerous figures in relief, but had dented in most of the smooth spaces. What was more, unless the worthy Scythian potentate had turned around a few times in his tomb one could not explain why dents were found on all sides of his tiara. However there had been no miracle, the bumps and indentations were made by using alternately the ends of a common ballpane hammer.
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