Incredible! A fake fresco at the Cairo Museum
6 Nov 2002
It's hard to imagine that since its discovery in 1987 in the tomb of Amosis IV, this fake fresco could have gone unnoticed by specialists for so long. Indeed, the viewer will detect numerous anachronisms. The pharaoh is depicted with his wife on his left, while a slave brings scented oil. His son sits lower down and wears the typical headdress. A closer examination reveals that he holds a three-inch floppy disk in his hand, while a ... Macintosh sits on the tablet, viewed from the side—clearly an object that did not exist at that time. The "Apple" logo is also visible in one of the cartouches.
The fresco was immediately removed. A thorough investigation revealed that its creator was none other than Jean-Pierre Petit, author in the 1980s of many similar forgeries, during the time he was deputy director of the University of Provence's Computing Center. It is regrettable that researchers at the CNRS at times devoted their leisure to such works. If you have masterpieces at home, make sure they don't contain such absurdities. According to our information, Petit had at that time circulated numerous forgeries signed
Daumier
,
Picasso
, Lautrec, etc.
The photo below comes from the temple of Karnak, whose portico is visible in the background. Contrary to what one might think, this is not a montage. Egyptian archaeologists often assemble stones found on site haphazardly to form, for example, a wall. This is exactly what we see before us.
In the main avenue of the Karnak complex, seen by millions of tourists
The stone at the center of the photograph clearly shows a pair of feet, probably belonging to a pharaoh or Osiris, with the bifurcated stem visible being the classic base of an "Egyptian shepherd's staff." Not only are the figure's feet upside down, but the hieroglyphic cartouche visible in the upper left is also upside down! One would expect the site's conservator to immediately exclaim, regarding stones seen daily by thousands of visitors (located in the central aisle), "Remove these blocks and put everything back straight on the site!" Well, no. The most likely explanation is that Egyptian archaeologists failed to notice this detail, which explains how Jean-Pierre Petit's forgery managed to escape their attention for fifteen years.
If the reassembly of the Karnak relief is a genuine absurdity, the Egyptian fresco is a hoax!
It was I myself who, twenty-five years ago, created these "works," pastiches such as this
fake Daumier
or this
fake Picasso
—all of which prominently feature a ... computer. A friend had an "Administrative Computing" magazine and had commissioned me to design covers. Thus, this entire series came into being. I have never been able to recover a fake Toulouse-Lautrec I made at the time, showing a group of prostitutes counting their earnings on a ... Macintosh. I never imagined for a single second that readers might take seriously pranks whose strings were so obvious. Who could have imagined that museum curators and art experts might fail to notice the glaring presence of a computer on an Egyptian relief, a Daumier, or a Picasso? Yet some readers were genuinely fooled.
When I posted on my website a dossier discussing the implementation of a test designed to detect stupidity, created by Wilfried Wurmstein and Laetitia Paparrazi, some readers immediately rushed to Google—a reflex now standard—to search for traces of these two researchers in what internet users today consider a true encyclopedia.
There is a lesson to be drawn from these experiences, where I myself was the first surprised. I have repeatedly written, "Learn to think for yourselves, or others will do it for you." These harmless pranks remind us how easily information can be manipulated. Some readers write to me, "We follow your writings because we trust you." That is not the right approach. You must learn to read everything that comes your way with a critical mind, just as I strive to do myself. What may be most interesting about this method of disseminating information on a website is its interactive nature. Readers constantly write to me, "What you say is incorrect; Untel was never president of a Franco-Israeli association… things didn't happen that way," and so on. I take these comments into account. Information that, on the internet, can remain accessible indefinitely becomes dynamic, subject to daily revision—and I am grateful to my readers for this. It is precisely this interactivity that has enabled me to venture into such specialized topics as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or, as I am doing now, a reminder of the events of the Algerian War.
Finally, know that Google, so astonishingly effective, was created by the NSA, the American National Science Administration. By becoming instantly the most powerful search engine on Earth, Google enters your home, detects your interests, locates you, and in time may even allow manipulation when you place absolute trust in it. Do you really think you can blindly trust the NSA? The current world is living through too serious times for us to remain naive. Lying is not a modern invention. Contemporary history reminds us of this, slowly giving birth to its truths.
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