Priests in ancient Babylon faked an inscription to make their temple seem older. A modern Scottish museum had to fake a fish with fur to satisfy public demand.
These are among 600 objects in a British Museum exhibition that displays 3,000 years of the forger's art and suggests that fakes often reflect what people want to believe.The objects range from a faked Roman chariot and photographs of fairies to a forged Rembrandt painting and a witch's wreath. The exhibition "Fake? The Art of Deception," running through Sept. 2, contains fake jewels, coins, sculptures, fossils, furniture and porcelain.
There's even a letter purporting to have been written by Jesus Christ.
Mark Jones, an expert on coins and medals who assembled the fakes from 26 museums in Britain and abroad, said the exhibition was "about deception, about lying things whenever and wherever they are made."
"It's evidence of what people saw and valued in the art of the past because a faked antique shows much more clearly than the real thing what collectors valued. Fakes often reflect what people want to believe," he said.
The museum's own archaeologists in 1881 brought back a Babylonian inscription from Iraq. It speaks of the renovation of a temple and the large revenues it received from the king and ends up saying, "This is not a lie, it B is indeed the truth." But modern studies showed it was a lie, written in about 1,000 B.C. and purporting to be 1,000 years older, probably by priests who wanted to strengthen their temple's claim to its rights and income.
The letter of Christ appears in the "Ecclesiastical History" of Eusebius, known as the father of church history, who was probably born in Palestine about 313 and became a bishop. In the invented letter, Christ blesses King Abgar for his belief in Christ's miraculous cures.
Then there's the furry trout.
A Scotsman wrote home from Canada in the 17th century about the abundance of "furried animals and fish." Asked to provide an example of furry fish he obliged - and a modern Canadian is still at it, putting rabbit fur on stuffed trout, with a text saying fish in great depths and penetrating cold grow a dense coat of protective fur.
"One of these fish was brought to us by someone who thought it was genuine," said Geoffrey Swinney of the Royal Museum of Scotland.
"We said it was a hoax and sent him away but the story had got out and public demand to see the furry fish was so strong that we had to make one - a fake twice over."