Authorities in New York have been accused by leading academics in France and Britain of repatriating fake Roman artefacts to Lebanon.
Eight out of nine mosaic panels that the US authorities recently returned to the Middle Eastern country are not what they seem, according to claims made by Djamila Fellague of the University of Grenoble.
She claims to have uncovered proof that forgers had copied designs from original mosaics in archaeological sites or museums in Sicily, Tunisia, Algeria and Turkey. “Eight of the nine ‘returned’ mosaic panels were fakes that [are] relatively easy to detect because the models used are famous mosaics,” says Fellague.
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She singled out a panel depicting an Anguiped Giant, that she believes is based on a section of the famous mosaics in the Villa Romana del Casale in Sicily, a Unesco world heritage site.
Christos Tsirogiannis, a guest lecturer at the University of Cambridge and a leading expert in looted antiquities and trafficking networks, believes the evidence is irrefutable.
He said that were the revelation to be shown to be true it would be extremely embarrassing for the office of the Manhattan district attorney (DA), which had announced the repatriation of antiquities to Lebanon on 7 September.
He added that the alleged forgers had made the mistake of copying well-known mosaics, which have been extensively photographed by tourists with images widely available on the internet and in academic publications.
Tsirogiannis leads research on illicit antiquities trafficking for the Unesco chair on threats to cultural heritage at the Ionian University in Corfu, Greece.
“At first I fought against this idea, telling myself that an investigation that led to a warrant arrest, a red notice from Interpol and a restitution to a country must have been the subject of a rigorous scientific study,” she said.
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