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The article is confusing and unclear and addresses many different topics at once. The digressions about bass-playing are frankly irrelevant. One could end up t
by bambax 4y ago
The article is confusing and unclear and addresses many different topics at once. The digressions about bass-playing are frankly irrelevant.
One could end up thinking all Dead Sea Scrolls are fakes. They are not. The Dead Sea Scrolls are real, but some fragments, sold as originals for millions of dollars to rich collectors, are modern forgeries.
And bad fakes too. Dead Sea Scrolls are made of parchment; the fakes are from leather. Both come from animal skin but parchment is stretched and dried while leather is tanned: mixed with vegetable astringent compounds that cause the skin to contract and harden. The fakes, possibly made from "ancient Roman shoes" (!) were coated with animal glue, and written upon with modern ink that followed the creases and tears of the leather. (Obviously when someone writes on a new piece of parchment that later becomes cracked and torn, there would be no writing inside the cracks).
Now I'm no scholar and I gathered the above from various online articles, but it seems it the deception was pretty obvious, and in fact once someone started doubting all experts agreed and there was no controversy.
I find the world of forgeries fascinating because it speaks of the human mind, how our desire to make something real blocks our perception and any kind of critical thinking. I wish the article spoke of that more rather than the various talents and life history of Mr. Langlois.
- ogogmad 4y agoThank you for this comment. I myself began to doubt whether any of the DSSes were real after reading the article, and your comment has assured me that they are. Additionally, those asides about the researcher's hobbies are indeed a trope of modern science documentaries, written by people who likely think that science isn't interesting enough on its own. Here is where I expressed my confusion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34253597 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34253597 Also, you say parchment; should it not be papyrus? Parchment doesn't get cracked.
- cto_of_antifa 4y ago[dead]
- bambax 4y ago> Also, you say parchment; should it not be papyrus? Parchment doesn't get cracked. Sources I could find all say the Dead Sea Scroll are in parchment, not papyrus, but as I said I'm not a scholar or an expert on this. It seems the problem with parchment is that it doesn't absorb ink, so that sometimes the mere rolling or unrolling can crack the ink out of the surface, even if the surface itself stays intact. Also, many fragments are torn apart, and in that case there should be no ink at the tear, whereas the forgeries were written all over, from side to side.
- largepeepee 4y ago>I find the world of forgeries fascinating because it speaks of the human mind, how our desire to make something real blocks our perception and any kind of critical thinking. Not just forgeries but modern claims like Salvator Mundi were legitimized by a small circle of experts and whales that wanted headliners. Fine art is very much like crypto, a wildly speculative asset controlled by a small inner market that is prone to criminal activity.
- dagw 4y agoI find the world of forgeries fascinating because it speaks of the human mind, how our desire to make something real blocks our perception and any kind of critical thinking. That's most fascinating thing about this whole field. Supposedly smart people who no doubt consider themselves critical thinkers, many of whom have been wildly successful at business, keep getting tricked into spending millions on obvious forgeries. I watched this documentary on wine forgery and it was the same thing there. People were paying $100+k for bottles that a simple 2 minutes google search would prove fake. Things like vintages from several years before the vineyard was founded, completely incorrect labels for the wine and vintage they where claiming and wines from years when that particular wine wasn't made. It's clear that for most people the actual authenticity of the items in their collection means absolutely nothing to them. All that matters is that it's convincing enough that they can fool their peers (and themselves). As long as you never let an expert verify your collection, everything in it is in fact authentic. And once the scam was uncovered their anger wasn't so much directed at the people who scammed them but at the experts butting in a ruining everything.
- hef19898 4y agoI wonder if those "obvious" mistakes aren't intentional, like the spelling errors in spam mails...
- bambax 4y agoIt's possible the enormity of the mistakes help sell the forgery, as in "they wouldn't dare sell a wine from a time before the winery even existed, so it must be true and the experts must have missed it"...