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.
Those auto tldr summaries can be super random and misleading too regardless. The auto tldr summary doesn’t imply anything like this either. It’s just a section of the article with an expert making fun of whatever expert the DA hired who missed that it was a forgery and thought it was authentic. So it’s embarrassing because they told this country, he we recovered your priceless artifact and threw the guy in jail who smuggled it. And the country is like, oh well that’s nice but the artifact was never missing in the first place. If you want to comment on something at least read the article first, or you’ll just be spreading misleading clickbait headlines even more.
I reckon I made a mistake here. I usually read the article but since what feels like almost 1 of 3 of shared articles here are locked behind paywalls I don’t bother anymore.