Scarab (forgery)

Creator

Preview

Creation Date

20th Century

Geography

New York City

Culture

Egyptian

Medium

Faience, Stone (possibly steatite)

Dimensions

1 3/4 × 7/8 × 3/5 in. (3.2 × 2.3 × 1.9 cm)

0.44 oz. (12.4 g)

Credit Line

Gift in Loving Memory of Boris Blick & Judith Rosenbloom Blick by their daughter Sarah Blick, 2024

Accession Number

2015.166.17

Provenance

Purchased by Boris Blick from Sadigh Gallery in New York City in the mid-1990s. Merhdad Sadigh established Sadigh Gallery of Ancient Art in 1978 as a small mail-order company before moving to its popular 5th Avenue location in Manhattan, New York. He sold ancient Anatolian, Babylonian, Byzantine, Greco-Roman, Mesopotamian, Sumerian, and Egyptian antiquities. In 2020, Mr. Sadigh was convicted of forgery and grand larceny for selling fake antiquities, despite his website claiming them to be “100% guaranteed authentic”.

Signatures, Inscriptions, and Markings

Undetermined Hieroglyphs

References

Ellie Westfall, “A Modern Forgery of an Ancient Scarab,” Kenyon VRC Blog, July 25, 2024. https://vrc.kenyon.edu/blog/a-modern-forgery-of-an-ancient-scarab/.

Description

Representing birth and renewal, a scarab is a beetle-shaped amulet used to guide the interred body through the afterlife. Inscriptions on the flat reverse are typically passages from magical corpora, such as the Book of the Dead.

This scarab, bright blue and seemingly well-preserved, is a modern-day forgery. The composition, style, and provenance point to this conclusion. The inscription on the underside is — while partially legible — ungrammatical, as well as the style and form being inconsistent with authentic pieces, such as those found at the Met (example 1, example 2). The pristine condition supports this claim as well. Finally, this scarab was tracked back to a well-known forgery dealer at Sadigh Gallery in New York in the mid-1990s. Sadigh has been prosecuted on multiple counts of forgery and grand larceny and his practice is no longer operating.

Ellie Westfall (’27) for Summer Scholars 2025