All that glisters isn't Oxus
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By Peter Watson Times 19 December 2003
One of the British Museum’s most important collections  the Oxus treasure, 180 gold and silver objects and coins dating from the sixth century BC  has been labelled as mostly fake
by an American curator. To make matters worse, he says there is no evidence that the treasure is one hoard or that it even comes from the Oxus River. Instead, the 19th-century adventurers who bought the objects in the bazaars of Peshawar and Rawalpindi were duped by local dealers.
Oscar White Muscarella is a distinguished archaeologist and senior research fellow in the ancient near east department of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. He has excavated for many years in Iran and Turkey and is the author of a standard work on Middle-Eastern archaeological forgeries, The Lie Became Great. His views cannot be dismissed lightly.
Muscarella has campaigned long and hard against what he calls “bazaar archaeology† the tendency for museums to acquire objects not by excavation but from local dealers, and then to believe the exaggerated and colourful stories these dealers tell about their “findsâ€Â. This is historically meaningless, he says, and seriously corrupts our understanding of the past.
He has decided to speak out now, in the scholarly pages of the learned journal Ancient Civilisations, because a new Oxus treasure, labelled OT-2 to distinguish it from OT-1, has been unveiled at the Miho Museum in Japan. This, say the museum authorities there, is the “lost†part of the original Oxus treasure which has turned up after more than a century underground. “Nonsense,†says Muscarella, not mincing his words, “it is all a fairytale.â€Â
The Oxus treasure in the British Museum consists of some 180 objects, including gold bracelets and armlets, rings, earrings and pendants, a gold sword scabbard, two model gold chariots containing three gold statuettes, three other gold statuettes, including a “priest†and a horseman, two stone cylinder seals, about 50 thin gold plaques and around 1,500 coins.
The treasure was acquired by the British Museum in 1897 and has been dated by scholars as either 6th century BC Median (from north-west Iran) or Achaemenian (the Achaemenids overthrew the Medes in the 6th century BC; Darius was the best known of their kings). It has been described in the past as not only one of the treasures of the British Museum, but as one of the treasures of the British nation and a wonder of the archaeological world. If genuine, it is priceless.
Muscarella’s suspicions about the treasure were first aroused when he began to examine the accounts of how it surfaced. He found, he says, a romantic story that reads more like fiction than sober fact. Inspecting the early accounts, he found that the treasure was supposed to have been found on the Oxus River in 1877 (the Oxus is now the Amu Darya River; it flows from northern Afghanistan, through Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan into the Aral Sea). But no precise spot was ever given and, according to a separate account, it was found elsewhere, “in the sandsâ€Â.
Nothing much happened to the treasure for three years until a British Army officer, Captain F. C. Burton, heard that some merchants travelling from Bokhara to Peshawar, in what is now northwestern Pakistan, had been robbed of a quantity of gold. Burton, in an amazing display of selflessness, tracked down the robbers, rescued the missing gold and returned it to the merchants. They said they had bought the gold at a site on the Oxus.
According to this account, these merchants, having had their gold returned to them, sold it on to others in Rawalpindi or Peshawar. However, and this is the part of the story that Muscarella finds particularly hard to swallow, the gold had been sealed in bags when Burton recovered it and he never saw what was inside. So there is no way of knowing what form this gold took, or even if it was gold at all. Instead, all we know is that the items that eventually ended up in the British Museum were bought in 1881 and 1883 in Rawalpindi by General A. Cunningham and A. Wollaston Franks, a medieval scholar. Cunningham eventually sold his share of the purchased goods to Franks, who bequeathed everything to the British Museum when he died in 1897.
This won’t do, says Muscarella. The Burton story is not just romantic but so improbable as to be complete fiction. There is no evidence that the gold Burton recovered near Peshawar (if indeed he did recover some since, strangely, he never saw what he had taken such pains to track down) was the same gold that was bought, between four and six years later, 100 miles away in Rawalpindi. This is simply taking local legends too far, says Muscarella: “Museums should be sceptical of such fairytales and, on any sensible view, there is really no evidence at all that the Oxus treasure came from the Oxus River, or even from one site.â€Â
Now there is OT-2. According to the Miho Museum, this part of the treasure  with more than 2,500 objects, larger than OT-1  was also acquired in 1877 by an (unnamed) individual who then reputedly re-buried his treasure and “died before revealing the burial spot to his familyâ€Â. His children and grandchildren knew about the treasure, but not where it was hidden. “After 120 years of patient diggingâ€Â, they found it and brought it to London, where it was sold secretly and acquired by the Miho.
“Come on,†says Muscarella, barely able to contain himself. “You can’t keep a straight face when you say this. At the least, it would have to be the unnamed man’s great-grandchildren, or great-great-grandchildren. The Miho also says that their treasure comes from the same hoard as OT-1 but from a different workshop. This is disingenuous, a shameful attempt to have their cake and eat it, to claim that, though OT-2 is different from OT-1, it is actually the same.â€Â
After pouring scorn on both museums’ too-willing acceptance of hoary tales, Muscarella turns his attention to the objects themselves. He reserves most venom for the 50 or so gold plaques that comprise almost a third of the treasure in the British Museum. Put bluntly, Muscarella says these plaques are crudely fashioned and unlike anything that has ever been excavated by competent archaeologists. “All essential details on the plaques, eyes, noses, hair, faces, hands, feet, hats, clothing, shoes and sleeves, are completely unparalleled in style and execution within any sphere of ancient art, most certainly including Achaemenian.â€Â
As an example of what he means, Muscarella singles out plaque 48, which the BM’s curator of ancient near eastern art, Dr John Curtis, describes as “the finest of the gold plaquesâ€Â. In fact, says Muscarella, the plaque is “poorly articulated . . . the sword’s scabbard and hilt position are wrongly conceived and executed, and the sword is not attached to the belt and thus floats in spaceâ€Â. The man’s tunic is wrongly drawn, “another indication that the provincial craftsman had no idea what he was executing in the first placeâ€Â.
Then, in a particularly damning remark, Muscarella discloses that “the figure also has two left feet, as does plaque 49â€Â. He adds drily: “I have not found two left feet on any figure in excavated Achaemenian art.†He also points out that Zoroastrian priests, in properly excavated material, never carry swords, although in the British Museum’s objects they do. He concludes therefore that the plaques were modelled by a 19th-century forger who wasn’t entirely familiar with the religion he was supposed to be depicting: he confused Achaemenian soldiers with Zoroastrian priests.
Other scholars, says Muscarella, have described plaque 48 as being particularly valuable because it is highly unusual and “introduces hitherto unknown information about ancient Zoroastrian priestly practicesâ€Â. More nonsense, says Muscarella, and there’s a much simpler explanation. “It’s a modern forgery by someone who had no idea what he was doing.â€Â
On other plaques, with other figures, the garments of the priests are not folded in typical ways and in one case the figure is female, very rare. He concludes: “There is not a shred of ancient workmanship visible on any example.â€Â
In addition to the plaques, Muscarella notes that the British Museum itself has conceded that at least eight other objects from the treasure are modern forgeries (one of the cylinder seals, a silver decorated disc, some of the gold statuettes and a silver vessel in the form of a goat); and to Muscarella there is no evidence that the 1,500 coins belong with the rest of the hoard. At least one numismatist agrees with him about the coins.
Muscarella also condemns as modern forgeries various other objects scattered about the museums of the world which are supposed to be part of the original Oxus treasure. He singles out a gold plaque in the Kunsthistorische Museum in Vienna and a statuette in the Lands of the Bible museum in Jerusalem.
But this is small beer compared with what he has to say about OT-2. He condemns all the gold plaques: “Not a single example can be accepted without reservations as ancient, all are crude and unparalleled in material known from proper excavations. Especially insulting to those viewing this material is the sun disc, which is especially badly executed. This figure is holding up his hands, surely in despair.â€Â
Not one of the gold and silver statuettes in the Miho is genuine, he says. “Not one of these lifeless creations could, would, have been made in an ancient workshop; the artisans would have been deported.†Neither are the Miho’s animal statuettes genuine, nor the jewellery, “all of which could easily have been produced in modern goldsmith shopsâ€Â.
These are strong words, but the reaction of Dr John Curtis at the British Museum is no less forceful. “Not many people will believe Muscarella,†he says. “For a start, he doesn’t know that six months ago we conducted laboratory tests on the treasure. They showed that it had platinum group inclusions, meaning it is made of alluvial rather than mined gold. That supports the idea that the gold is ancient. Also, some of the objects include iconographical details that were not unearthed in proper archaeological circumstances until the excavations at Persepolis in the 1930s. No 19th-century forger could have anticipated that.
“And he ignores contemporary Russian reports about a large gold treasure being discovered on the north bank of the Oxus. Then again, he’s wrong about the priests and the swords: they are positioned exactly where they should be. Overall, I think his article is poorly researched and irresponsible so far as the British Museum is concerned.
“It is a disservice to scholarship to link the Miho and the BM in this way. OT-1 and OT-2, so called, are not linked in any way. The gold in the Miho Museum is a large, unprovenanced treasure, and that’s all you can say.â€Â
Muscarella remains unconvinced. “Curtis is wrong about the sword and the Russian reports, which I know about, have nothing to do with what is in the British Museum.
“There is no Oxus treasure,†he concludes simply. “Both OT-1 and OT-2 are modern constructions, ‘documented’  in quotes  by colourful but invented stories and where a large proportion of the artefacts are modern forgeries. They tell us more about modern museums, and their urge to acquire, than they do about the past. I believe I am correct and suggest that non-parti-pris scholars will accept my arguments; several already have. It was not me who linked the Miho treasure with the British Museum, the Miho did that.
“The British Museum should stop pretending. It has so many real treasures under its roof that the loss of one ‘hoard’ won’t make any difference to its reputation or attendance figures. And it would send a welcome signal to the underground trade of forgers and dealers that we are not all as gullible as Indiana Jones.â€Â
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