The Lying Stones of Marrakech Read Free Page A

destroying) the lives of thousands, and misdirecting entire professions into sterility for generations. Scoundrels may find the matrix of temptation irresistible, for immediate gains in money and power can be so great, while human gullibility grants the skillful forger an apparently limitless field of operation. The Van Gogh Sunflowers , bought in 1987 by a Japanese insurance companyfor nearly 25 million pounds sterling—then a record price for a painting—may well be a forged copy made around 1900 by the stockbroker and artist manqué Emile Schuffenecker. The phony Piltdown Man, artlessly confected from the jaw of an orangutan and a modern human cranium, derailed the profession of paleoanthropology for forty years, until exposed as a fake in the early 1950s.
    Earlier examples cast an even longer and broader net of disappointment. A large body of medieval and Renaissance scholarship depended upon the documents of Hermes Trismegistus (Thrice-Great Hermes), a body of work attributed to Thoth, the Egyptian god of wisdom, and once viewed as equal in insight (not to mention antiquity) to biblical and classical sources—until exposed as a set of forgeries compiled largely in the third century A.D. And how can we possibly measure the pain of so many thousands of pious Jews, who abandoned their possessions and towns to follow the false messiah Shabbetai Tzevi to Jerusalem in the apocalyptic year of 1666—only to learn that their leader, imprisoned by the sultan and threatened with torture, had converted to Islam, been renamed Mehmed Efendi, and made the sultan’s personal doorkeeper.
    The most famous story of fraud in my own field of paleontology may not qualify for this first rank in the genre, but has surely won both general fame and staying power by persistence for more than 250 years. Like all great legends, this story has a canonical form, replete with conventional moral messages, and told without any variation in content across the centuries. Moreover, this standard form bears little relationship to the actual course of events as best reconstructed from available evidence. Finally, to cite the third common property of such legends, a correction of the conventional tale wins added and general value in teaching us important lessons about how we use and abuse our own history. Thus, the old story merits yet another retelling—which I first provide in the canonical (and false) version known to so many generations of students (and no doubt remembered by many readers from their college courses in natural science).
    In 1726, Dr. Johann Bartholomew Adam Beringer, an insufferably pompous and dilettantish professor and physician from the town of Würzburg, published a volume, the Lithographiae Wirceburgensis (Würzburg lithography), documenting in copious words and twenty-one plates a remarkable series of fossils that he had found on a mountain adjacent to the city. These fossils portrayed a large array of objects, all neatly exposed in three-dimensional relief on the surface of flattened stones. The great majority depicted organisms, nearly all complete, including remarkable features of behavior and soft anatomy that had never been noted in conventional fossils—lizards in their skin, birds complete with beaks and eyes, spiders with their webs, bees feeding on flowers, snails next to theireggs, and frogs copulating. But others showed heavenly objects—comets with tails, the crescent moon with rays, and the sun all effulgent with a glowing central face of human form. Still others depicted Hebrew letters, nearly all spelling out the tetragrammaton, the ineffable name of God—YHVH, usually transliterated by Christian Europe as “Jehovah.”
    Beringer did recognize the difference between his stones and conventional fossils, and he didn’t state a dogmatic opinion about their nature. But he didn’t doubt their authenticity either, and he did dismiss claims that they had been carved by