An awful lyre

March 25, 2016 12:51 AM

The seal was a remarkable find, bearing the name of an unknown princess and the only depiction of an ancient Israelite harp. Good enough to be depicted on Israeli coinage? Almost too good... The Trouble With the Maadana

In contrast, this impression from a seal of King Hezekiah is almost certainly authentic: it was found in a controlled dig, and it matches impressions found elsewhere. Similarly, this seal, which was found thousands of miles from Israel is also almost certainly authentic, as are these. They're all very exciting, but in different ways.

posted by Joe in Australia (8 comments total)

This was a very interesting article, and I reckon I would have missed it otherwise. Thanks for sharing it with us!
posted by barnacles at 4:33 AM on March 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

"Lame Bet Workshop". Love it.

It's kind of cool that the forgeries were identified this way. A bunch of questionable artifacts have the same distinct artifacts have the same distinct handwriting.
posted by nangar at 5:15 AM on March 25, 2016

David played a Tele, and it was righteous.

I do like the sound of that Lenny Wolfe bloke, though. He's quoted as saying “The greater, the more sensational the story, the more the chances of it being real are miniscule. I'm very interested in the behavioural or anthropological aspects of the antiquities trade.”
posted by scruss at 5:58 AM on March 25, 2016 [2 favorites]

This was really interesting (and a great post title)... One thing that strikes me about how difficult this is, is how rare it seems to be to find women's names attached to any historical artifact. So when something surfaces like this with a woman potentially in a position of power, and a link to something she cared about, it leaps from an interesting artifact to a potentially important one, especially for women who are just plain tired of perpetual marginalization.

Having it be a fake is almost a double whammy - both because a seal that remembered a powerful woman still doesn't exist in our collective history, and because Maadana likely never existed, or someone (or even many women) like her did but were never deemed important enough to have their story told.

But at least the forger remembered that women existed in the past and considered them worth commemorating, so partial win?
posted by Mchelly at 7:42 AM on March 25, 2016 [2 favorites]

A fascinating story, thanks for linking it!
posted by languagehat at 7:50 AM on March 25, 2016

A woman discovered the truth and brought it forward:

As the Bank of Israel was preparing to unveil its new coin designs, a musicologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem named Bathja Bayer had a conversation with Rachel Barkay, an expert in ancient coins at the Bank who was also writing the official literature about the artifacts chosen to adorn the new money. Bayer was a specialist in the archaeology of music and had devoted much of her studies to biblical lyres. She said that she had information about the Maadana. It turned out she had some startling news: The princess, the lyre, the entire seal, Bayer said, was a forgery.

The Maadana lyre could never have existed in any ancient culture, she argued. Its asymmetrical sound box was unlike any other known ancient lyres, and with the crossbar resting on the top of outcurving arms, the instrument would collapse the first time it was tuned. The twelve strings tightly squeezed together in the tiny lyre corresponded to a written description of the twelve-stringed lyre of the temple by the writer Josephus Flavius. But Josephus’s account was historically doubtful; he lived more than 700 years after the period ascribed to the Maadana, leading Bayer to suggest the seal may have been designed to fit Josephus’s description. Furthermore, Bayer argued, it was unlikely a woman of royalty in seventh-century B.C.E. Jerusalem would wish to publicly associate with a lyre. In those days, she said, a female musician would have been considered a prostitute.

And was rebuffed by men whose reputations were on the line at every turn when, rightfully, she should have been celebrated.
posted by jamjam at 1:31 PM on March 25, 2016 [2 favorites]

at least the forger remembered that women existed in the past and considered them worth commemorating, so partial win?

There are authentic ones belonging to women, like one in the last link, but they're much rarer - one figure I've seen is thirty-five out of "thousands".

Reportedly, only ten percent of seals have good provenance. I'm sure this is partially due to the fact that they're easy for unlicensed diggers to excavate and easy for them to sell; on the other hand, the fact that there is a good market means that they're just the sort of thing that a forger would create. For instance, there's a gorgeous seal that bears the name "Jezebel", but it's unprovenanced and there are very substantial questions about it.

Anyway, I'm glad you found that part interesting, because I have another FPP lined up that's about the discoveries at Elephantine, particularly the archive of a Jewish woman called Yehoyishma.

Which would have been a fantastic name for a daughter, incidentally, because she could have told the story every time someone asked her to spell it, but no, I'm not at all upset that we went for a different one.
posted by Joe in Australia at 3:54 AM on March 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

It doesn't look like the Jews are ever going to get an actual harp of their own.
posted by acb at 9:39 AM on March 26, 2016