Fakes, Replicas and Restoration in the Trade in Cypriot Antiquities

Doubtful pieces have been part of the trade in Cypriot antiquities for as long as there has been a trade. Most of them are not forgeries in the strict sense. The commonest are genuine ancient objects that were restored, completed or put together from unrelated parts, a practice that began with the first great collection taken from the island. Next come honest modern replicas, sold in Cyprus as copies, that lose their labels and resurface abroad as "ancient". Whole-cloth forgery exists but gathers in a few expensive classes. A fourth group is ancient and genuine but was made in Canaan or Egypt, not Cyprus. This page sets out that history and what it means for the market. It does not repeat the owner's checklist: for how to examine a piece in the hand, see Cypriot pottery replicas and fakes. The statue at the head of the page, Aphrodite holding Eros, is one of the limestone sculptures from Golgoi in the collection Luigi Palma di Cesnola sold to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the collection over which the first public dispute about Cypriot restoration was fought.

Cesnola's composites and the dispute of the 1880s

The first record of the problem is a letter. In December 1868 the British Museum asked Robert Hamilton Lang, then a banker and acting consul on the island, about a rumour that forgery of antiquities was increasing in Cyprus. Lang replied that "forgery is scarcely the word". What people had heard of was "the getting up of certain pieces" by the American consul, Cesnola, who was "very clever in the re-arrangement of pieces" and, Lang had told him, "carries it too far. He adds a nose for example where it is wanted and so well that to an inexperienced eye the addition can scarcely be detected." Cesnola had at first used acid too freely and destroyed original colour, then retouched the pieces; but, Lang wrote, "he only acts on really ancient pieces" [1, p. 44].

The dispute became public once the collection was in New York. The Metropolitan bought the first part in 1874 and the second, with the "Kourion treasure", in 1876 [2, p. 21]. Clarence Cook and the Paris dealer Gaston Feuardent then accused Cesnola of having "reconstructed a certain number of statues from fragments that did not belong together and of having sometimes made modern additions, thus creating real fakes". The lawsuit that followed led to a committee of experts, whose conclusions were favourable to Cesnola [2, p. 21]. The museum's own catalogue of 2014, by Antoine Hermary and Joan Mertens, sets the record between the two sides. It states that "the most unfortunate interventions had actually taken place prior to the works' arrival in New York", as sculptures sent to Istanbul and "recomposed imaginatively" show; that some errors in New York were corrected quickly and others were not; and that most concern "statues and, above all, of statuettes receiving heads whose pertinence is erroneous or doubtful". Some of those heads have been removed only recently, and the catalogue flags the rest at the head of each entry [2, p. 21].

Painted pottery was treated the same way. A painted vase from Ormidhia, by then in New York, was published in the 1880s with a figure scene that had been painted on in modern times and was later cleaned off. John Myres, writing on it in 1954, judged that repainting of this kind was "not so heinous an offence in Cesnola's generation as in our own" [3].

Value could also be added with writing. A small Late Bronze Age stone tripod in the Musei Reali in Turin, published by Palma di Cesnola in 1887, carries Cypro-Syllabic inscriptions that are "unanimously considered as a modern fake", at least the two longest. The forger copied one from a drawing of a Golgoi inscription printed by Moritz Schmidt in 1874, and the other from a study of the syllabary published by Johannes Brandis in 1873 [1, p. 273]. The object is ancient; the text that made it a dedication to Apollo is of the nineteenth century.

The trade in Europe had its forgers too. Among the dealers from whom the French collector Paul de La Charlonie bought antiquities, one Paris dealer who acquired Cypriot objects at the Boysset sale in 1900 is described in La Charlonie's own list as both "marchand d'antiquités" and "faussaire grec" [4]. Robert Merrillees, who published the list, could not identify any of La Charlonie's Bronze Age Cypriot objects with a find-spot [4].

These cases matter for the modern market because the old collections are now its main supply. A piece that left Cyprus lawfully in the 1870s may still carry a head, a foot or a painted panel that is not its own. Old paper proves an old history; it does not prove that every part of the object is ancient or belongs together.

Restorers and dealers in the twentieth century

Restoration did not stop with Cesnola. Museums and collectors restored Cypriot pots throughout the twentieth century, most of it openly, and the trade developed habits of its own. In The Art of Ancient Cyprus (1985) the zoologist and collector Desmond Morris described the work of his conservator, Kathleen Kimber, on his own collection, and listed "three common 'tricks of the trade'" she had met: "the smearing of a pseudo-encrustation over fractures to conceal their presence", so that objects would seem to clean up "perfect"; leaving "a small flaw conspicuously unconcealed to distract from a major flaw that was carefully covered up"; and assembling "'hybrid' objects using parts from different originals" [5, p. 368]. A typical hybrid is the neck of one vessel joined to the body of another.

The step from improvement to forgery is short. Writing in 1991 on Red Polished plank-shaped figurines, Vassos Karageorghis identified a fake that had "appeared recently in New York" in a 1989 sale catalogue, and thought it "probably made by the same person who incised two plank-shaped figurines on a Red Polished bowl" in the same catalogue [6, p. 98]. The bowl is the important case. Incision cut into a genuine plain ancient bowl turns a cheap object into a rare figural one, and the clay itself is old.

Honest replicas that resurface as ancient

Most modern copies of Cypriot antiquities were made and sold honestly. The government's Cyprus Handicraft Service runs a centre in Strovolos, Nicosia, set up after 1974 to give work to craftspeople displaced by the Turkish invasion; its shop sells ceramics and "ancient figures" beside embroidery and copperwork [7]. Private workshops make replicas under licence and for museums: Studio Ceramics Workshops in Larnaca, founded in 1991, makes replicas "of the prehistoric and ancient world of Cyprus" and has worked with the Department of Antiquities, the Pierides Museum and the Leventis Municipal Museum [8]. Museum shops on the island sell copies of the best-known pieces, the Vounous bowl among them.

The trouble begins when a copy leaves the shop. Tourists took replicas home for decades, and after a generation or two the receipt is gone and the piece is "the old Cypriot jug". A group sold by Leland Little Auctions in North Carolina on 15 June 2018 shows the pattern: eight earthenware pieces with an "antiqued finish", two signed "Sofronia", from a private American collection that called itself "The Cyprus Museum", sold under the title "Group of Antique Cypriot Pottery Reproductions" [9]. Only the word "Reproductions" described the objects correctly. In catalogues the words "style", "type" and "in the manner of" usually mean that the cataloguer does not vouch for the age.

A replica is legal to own and legal to sell as a replica. It becomes a fake only when someone sells it as ancient. At the bottom of the market, where pieces are sold from a photograph and a line of text, that can happen by mistake as easily as by design.

Forgery and the classes it concentrates in

In January 1983 Karageorghis, then Director of the Department of Antiquities, was asked whether forgery was a problem in the Cypriot trade. "No. Except for jewelry, fakes are virtually unknown," he said [10, p. 364]. Eight years later he was naming fakes in print [6, p. 98]. Both statements were fair to their moment. Ordinary Bronze Age and Iron Age pots were plentiful, cheap and supplied in quantity by lawful export, and nobody needed to fake them. The fakes he named in 1991 were of rare figural types whose prices had risen in the 1980s.

The published cases are few, and they cluster in the same classes:

Dorothy Knox, who catalogued the Bronze Age figurines in 2012, listed the traits that condemn the Earring figurine, "the unusual shape of the ears, enlarged, reptilian eyes, steatopygia and swollen stomach", and added: "Yet even this fooled a respected scholar of the Cypriot Bronze Age" [11, p. 85]. Publication by an authority is not authentication, and neither is a sale at a major house: one of Karageorghis's 1989 fakes was a Christie's lot.

The high-value classes on which forgery would pay are the ones the market prices highest: plank figures, figural Red Polished vessels such as the zoomorphic vessels, Chalcolithic picrolite figures, stone plank figures, Archaic and Classical limestone heads, Bronze Age vessels with modelled scenes, and bronzes. For the stone classes the published record of fakes is thin rather than reassuring. There is no survey of Cypriot forgery as there is for Cycladic marble, and the problem the literature does document for picrolite is attribution: market pieces described as "probably from" a looted cemetery because they appeared after it was looted. Christine Winkelmann, in her 2020 corpus of Neolithic and Chalcolithic figurines, states the working rule: the trade in objects from illicit digging "opens the door to art forgeries. Therefore, all objects of uncertain or unknown origin are treated with caution since their authenticity can neither be proved nor accepted without concerns" [13, p. 26].

Ancient, but not Cypriot

Some pieces are ancient and genuine but were made outside Cyprus. Cypriot pottery was prized abroad in the Late Bronze Age, and potters in Canaan, Syria and Egypt copied it. "Local imitation Base Ring II jugs are widespread throughout Canaan, especially during the 13th century BCE, and are prevalent in tombs" [14, p. 141]. In Egypt during the 18th Dynasty "most of the Egyptian imitations are faithful copies", made of Nile silt or marl clay, and carvers also copied Base Ring jugs in stone [15, p. 146]. As early as 1968 Robert Merrillees warned that earlier typologies of Cypriot pottery found in Egypt mixed genuine pieces with Egyptian copies [16]. The traffic also ran the other way, with Cypriot potters making their own versions of Mycenaean pottery.

These copies are about as old as the Cypriot originals and pass a laboratory dating test. Only study of the fabric, and in the end a thin section under the microscope, can separate a Canaanite or Egyptian Base Ring juglet from one made in Cyprus. In the trade they are often catalogued simply as "Cypriot". Their legal history is that of the country they came from, not Cyprus, which matters when a buyer asks about export.

What laboratory tests can and cannot settle

Thermoluminescence (TL) measures roughly when fired clay was last heated, so it separates an ancient pot from a wholly modern one; our guide to thermoluminescence dating explains the method. Its record against wholesale forgery is strong. When the Oxford laboratory tested pots and figurines in the style of Hacılar, in prehistoric Turkey, that had been bought by museums and collectors, 48 of 66 pots proved modern [17].

For the Cypriot cases above, its limits matter as much as its strengths. TL passes decoration added to a genuine pot, such as the incised plank figures on Karageorghis's bowl. It passes a composite unless each part is sampled. It cannot say "Cypriot", so a Canaanite copy fires as ancient. It cannot date stone or metal, which takes in exactly the classes the market prices highest: limestone heads, picrolite and stone plank figures, and bronzes. A pot reheated in a fire loses its signal, and artificial irradiation has been used to give modern pots an ancient one. Above all, a TL certificate says nothing about where a pot was found or how it left Cyprus. A fake can carry a genuine-looking test; a genuine pot can still have been dug illicitly. For the paperwork side, see export licences and labels.

Fakes and the looting story

An object with no history needs an explanation for the missing paper, and in the Cypriot trade the explanation offered is often a story of loss: "from the north", or "the family brought it out in 1974". The story does two things for a seller. It accounts for the absence of an export licence or an old label, and it suggests that the piece is rare and comes from a known looted area. The 1974 presumption gives such a story its force, because a buyer who already expects undocumented Cypriot material to be looted takes the story as confirmation, not as a warning. A buyer who accepts it is buying an object that, on the seller's own account, should not be sold at all; a buyer who doubts it is left with an object of unknown age.

Only a few cases connecting fakes to seizures are on the public record. The Cyprus Mail reported on 6 October 2018 that a man had been remanded in Cyprus for selling fake antiquities [18]. In February 2009 Turkish Cypriot police in the occupied north seized a manuscript with Bible excerpts in gold lettering on vellum during a raid on suspected antiquities smugglers, and told a court that it "could be about 2,000 years old". Experts quoted at the time were divided over whether it was an original or a fake, and said that the gold lettering was likely to date it much later [19]. It was a manuscript, not an archaeological find; on why the trade in church art and religious objects is a separate market, see church art and antiquities.

We know of no published case in which a Cypriot object withdrawn from sale at the request of the Department of Antiquities was afterwards announced to be modern. The withdrawals and returns of 2024 to 2026, set out in policing and monitoring, are of ordinary ancient pots and the occasional limestone head. Police valuations of seized objects, which assume every piece is genuine and rare, are a separate problem, treated in the economics of looting.

The evidence against this reading

The case made here is that fakes, replicas and restorations gather at the cheap end of the market, and that the documented old-collection piece is the safer object. Four kinds of evidence cut against it.

First, fakes have reached the top of the market and of scholarship. One of the plank figurines Karageorghis condemned was a Christie's lot, and the Earring figurine was published by a leading specialist before it was condemned [6, p. 98; 11, p. 85]. Fine pieces in the expensive classes make five- and six-figure sums, as set out in the economics of looting, and those are the prices that pay a skilled forger.

Second, old collections are not free of doubtful pieces. Cesnola's sculpture contains heads that do not belong, some removed only recently [2, p. 21]; a Late Bronze Age tripod carries a nineteenth-century inscription [1, p. 273]; and a collector of around 1900 bought from a dealer he himself listed as a forger [4]. A long history proves that an object has been in circulation for a long time, not that it is genuine or whole.

Third, an old history does not mean the object came out of the ground lawfully. Samuel Hardy, who calls his method "crude", counted 214 of 319 objects (67%) in a public collection acquired before the conflict of 1963 to 1974 as "neither scientifically excavated nor found through survey or by accident" [20, pp. 459, 466]. Much of the material collected on the island in 1963 to 1973 was dug illicitly before it was registered (see collecting under the silent accord). The state and its partners have also paid intermediaries to recover pieces, a record set out in the state as buyer.

Fourth, the published record of fakes is short, and it lists only the fakes that have been detected.

The record answers these points in part. The published fakes are concentrated in a few figural classes, not spread through the ordinary pots that make up most of the trade. The composites in old collections are known because those collections are documented and have been studied, catalogued and corrected; the Metropolitan's catalogue flags every doubtful head. An object first recorded in 1880 or 1930 cannot be a copy of a type first published in 1970, and an old photograph, label or sale entry shows what the object looked like before any later restorer reached it. Hardy's figure concerns how objects were found, not whether they left the island lawfully, and it concerns genuine objects. A documented history does not settle authenticity on its own, but it gives a specialist something to check.

What the evidence means for an object on the market today

The market has two problems at its lower end. Doubtful pieces, honest replicas sold on as ancient, dealers' composites and the occasional forgery, sell cheaply at small regional and online venues, often from a photograph. Undocumented genuine pieces fall under the 1974 presumption and sink to the same venues. A buyer there cannot easily tell which problem a given piece has, and a looting story attached to it makes both worse. The documented old-collection piece is worth more because it escapes both: its history shows how it left Cyprus, and its record lets a specialist see what has been done to it since. A piece in one of the expensive classes, figural Red Polished, picrolite, stone plank figures, limestone heads or bronzes, needs that history most, because those are the classes where forgery pays and laboratory testing helps least.

For an owner, an heir or a buyer, what a doubtful piece is can usually be established. A replica is a legal object; a restored ancient pot is still ancient; an Egyptian copy of a Base Ring juglet is a genuine antiquity in its own right. The owner's guide, Cypriot pottery replicas and fakes, explains what can be checked at home; what is my Cypriot antiquity worth? covers how restoration and history move price; and provenance and provenience explains the difference between a find-spot and an ownership history. If you are unsure what a piece is, or whether it can be sold, contact us with photographs and whatever paper survives: we can usually say what it is and what the next step should be.