The implications of Ibrahim’s findings are indeed sinister. The whole process of creating a fake mummy that could fool experts even for a few days would have required a team of people skilled in many different areas, including ancient art, archaeology, and anatomy, not to mention the facilities in which to carry out the forgery, as well as the various chemicals and other materials needed in the manufacture. If the woman’s body had been taken from a grave, then it would need to have been done soon after burial, because in hot countries such as Pakistan and Iran bodies decompose quickly. However, the forger’s desperate need for a fresh body and the violence of the woman’s injuries indicate she may well have been murdered. Either way, it is a shocking act. Disturbingly, at least two more “Persian mummies” have appeared for sale in recent years on the antiquities black market, possibly indicating other victims in this murderous trade. One also wonders how many of these macabre fakes have already been sold to unsuspecting collectors who chose not to have them properly authenticated.
The Chiemsee Cauldron
In May 2001 a local amateur diver discovered a strange gold cup while diving in Lake Chiemsee, a tourist destination east of the city of Rosenheim, Bavaria, Germany. The object had been lying in the mud on the bottom of the lake about 655 feet from the northern shore, near Seebruck. The diver took the object to an art dealer known only as Thorsten K and in late 2001/early 2002 the pair sent the cup to Dr. Ludwig Wamser, head of the Bavarian State Archaeological Collection in Munich, for analysis. An initial inspection revealed that the cup was made of 18-carat gold, measured 20 inches in diameter and 12 inches in height, and weighed 23 pounds. But it was the decoration on the cup that caught the archaeologist’s attention. The repoussé (raised in relief) decoration, illustrating heavily stylized mythical Celtic symbols, horned deities, fantastic animals, and hunters wielding huge trumpets, drew parallels with a mysterious ancient artifact known as the Gundestrup Cauldron.
The Gundestrup cauldron is a lavishly decorated silver vessel, dating between the second and first centuries BC, placing it within the late La Tène (European Iron Age) culture or early Roman Iron Age. The vessel, which measures 27 inches in diameter and 16.5 inches in height, and weighs about 20 pounds, was discovered in a small peat bog at Gundestrup, in the Aars parish of Himmerland, Denmark, on May 28, 1891. The incredible vessel is made up of 13 panels decorated with repoussé portrayals of deities, fabulous creatures, wheel symbols, warriors, trumpeteers, and ritual scenes, which have been associated with various aspects of Iron Age Celtic religion, though its exact origins and purpose remain elusive. Could the Chiemsee Cauldron be in some way related to the 2,000-year-old example from Gundestrup? At first Dr. Wamser thought it was, and in February 2002 gave a presentation in Würzburg University’s Toscana Hall, lauding what was now the “Chiemsee Cauldron” as the “Celtic discovery of the century.”
17.2. Lake Chiemsee. Courtesy of Wikipedia.
There was speculation that the gold cup had been an ancient ritual deposit in Lake Chiemsee, and researchers noted that Iron Age Celtic finds, including coins, had been found in the area around the lake. There was apparently another similarity between the Chiemsee Cauldron and the Gundestrup Cauldron: They were both found in water, and therefore could have been votive deposits to Celtic deities, perhaps akin to the Llyn Cerrig Bach hoard of bronze and iron objects deposited in a lake in the northwest of the island of Anglesey, Wales, from about 300 BC to AD 100. However, although the Gundestrup Cauldron had been found in a bog, when it was originally deposited 2,000 or so years ago the area had in fact been dry land, so the object had either been lost or thrown away, and was possibly connected to the defended Iron Age settlement that lies nearby, rather than being a ritual deposit.
However, unbeknown to his audience at Toscana Hall, Dr. Wamser had carried out a close examination of the Chiemsee Cauldron and discovered that although the artistic style was indeed Iron Age Celtic in appearance, the metal had in fact been soldered, which put its date firmly in the 20th century. So after initially building up the importance of the cauldron, Dr. Wamser announced to the stunned lecture audience that the gold cauldron was a fake, probably constructed in the 1930s by the Nazis, who he said had planned to build a huge education center on the shore of Lake Chiemsee to spread their ideology. When this plan was thwarted, the object may have been thrown into the lake to avoid it falling into the hands of advancing U.S. troops. This theory was supported by a claim made by a man named Theodor Heiden, who stated that his jeweler’s company’s goldsmith, Alfred Notz, had told him some time before his death in the 1960s about a “golden cauldron weighing more than 10 kilograms (22 lbs.), with a figurative ornament and manufactured by means of the paddle and anvil technique.”2 Apparently the cauldron had been manufactured in Heiden’s Munich workshop between 1925 and 1939, at the request of the company Elektrochemische Werke München in Hollriegelskreuth, just to the south of Munich. The director of this company, Nazi supporter Albert Pietzsch, also head of the Reich Chamber of Commerce and an associate of Hitler, is supposed to have been a customer of the goldsmith’s workshop. Had the Nazis manufactured an expensive copy of the Gundestrup cauldron because of what they interpreted as its Germanic imagery?
Whatever the truth of this story, when news of the Chiemsee Cauldron broke in early August 2002, despite the fact that it was a 20th-century creation, its gold value alone was worth an estimated $96,000. Rumors also began to spread of the existence of lost Nazi gold that had been sunk in Lake Chiemsee at the end of WWII, and that the gold cup had been a kind of Nazi Holy Grail, which had been used in occult initiation rites in Herrenchiemsee castle, located on an island in the lake. But such speculation was forced into the background when it came to the issue of the ownership and possible sale of the Chiemsee Cauldron. Bernd Schreiber, Bavarian Finance Ministry spokesman, said that if it was established that the cup was the property of the Nazis then the diver who discovered the object would receive nothing, as such items are considered the property of the state. However, proof that the Chiemsee Cauldron was manufactured by the Nazis was never found, and an agreement was reached between the Bavarian state and the finder to share the proceeds of the object’s sale in 2003 for a reputed 300,000 Euro (about $390,000 at current exchange rates) to a Munich businessman. This price represented almost twice the market value of the gold in the cup.
In 2005 the cauldron was re-sold to a former CEO of a large Swiss distributor in Zurich. The new owner of the Chiemsee Cauldron, known only as “Martin K,” lost no time in trying to attract investors to what he claimed was an incredibly significant ancient artifact “probably the most important art-historical discovery in the Western Hemisphere.”3 According to Martin K, the object’s value had also risen significantly: “experts believe its value could reach a sum of around €1 billion”4 ($1.4 billion). Soon he was marketing the cauldron as the original Holy Grail, and had attracted investors from Kazakhstan who transferred €1.1 million ($1.5 million) to his Swiss account via a Moscow bank; others apparently followed, and soon the Swiss businessman had received 7.4 million Euros in investments.
But as time went on it was clear that the sale of the Chiemsee Cauldron was not likely to happen, and the investors grew suspicious. In March 2006 they reported the matter to the authorities. Charges were files against the Swiss businessman, who was later revealed to be Marcel Wunderli, director of Morgan Stanwick Ltd., a private limited company located in the Canton of St. Gallen, in northeast Switzerland, who were involved in the “management of and trade in art and antiquities.”5 In 2007 the cauldron was confiscated by Swiss authorities, and on October 27, 2010, a fraud trial began against Wunderli. Meanwhile, Morgan Stanwick Ltd. was dissolved, leaving behind millions of dollars in claims. In August 2012, 63-year-old Wunderli was given a three-year jail sentence for fraud by a Zurich court. The result of these proceedings is that the Chiemsee Cauldron, whatever its origin, is in legal limbo, hidden away in a vault of the Zurich Cantonal Bank as part of the bankrupt company’s
estate.
A Nazi Buddha From Space
The 1938–1939 German Expedition to Tibet led by German zoologist Ernst Schäfer has often been associated in popular culture with a Nazi occult mission to discover a secret subterranean realm and make contact with the Nazi’s Aryan forefathers hidden in the Himalayas. Books like Pauwels and Bergier’s The Morning of the Magicians (1960) and Trevor Ravenscroft’s The Spear of Destiny (1973) make these claims, although there is no hard evidence to back them up. The real purpose of the German expedition of 1938–1939 was more mundane: to create a complete scientific record of Tibet and bring back important zoological and botanical samples. It was apparently during this expedition that Schäfer discovered a strange statue and brought it back to Germany.
The stone statue of a bearded figure wearing trousers, which measures 9.4 inches in height and weighs 22 pounds, is thought to depict the Buddhist god Vaisravana. The figure has an earring in his right ear, bears a Buddhist swastika on his armoured breastplate, and is holding a round object in his left hand. Could the swastika symbol on the statue have been the motivation for its theft from Tibet? The Buddha statue seemingly disappeared during WWII, after which it changed hands between various private collectors until it came up for auction in 2007, and its new Munich-based owner decided to have it scientifically tested in Germany. Researchers dated the unique statue stylistically to the 11th century AD. But it was the scientific tests that were to prove most astonishing. After chemical analyses of the object, Dr. Elmar Buchner, of the Institute for Planetary Sciences at the University of Stuttgart, stated that the concentrations of metals in the object, including iron, nickel, cobalt, and chromium, indicated that it had been carved from a meteorite. Further analysis proved that the meteorite was of an extremely rare type known as ataxite, a class of iron meteorites with high nickel content. Astonishingly, its origin could be traced to a specific event in meteorite history. Dr. Buchner and his team discovered that the statue had been carved from a fragment of the Chinga meteorite, which fell in the border areas between Mongolia and Siberia about 15,000 years ago, and was officially discovered in 1913, though there may have been earlier finds from the site. In other words, the 1,000-year-old Buddha statue had an extraterrestrial origin.
However, in October 2012 news broke that there were doubts about the age of the Iron Man (as the statue had become known). Firstly, German historian Isrun Engelhardt, an expert on Schäfer’s expedition to Tibet, drew attention to the detailed list that members of the expedition kept of the items they purchased in Tibet. This list, which includes more than 2,000 items, and notes each one’s date and place of purchase, as well as its value, makes no mention of a Buddhist statue. Secondly, after examining the statue, Buddhism specialist professor Achim Bayer of the Dongguk University, Seoul, South Korea, identified 13 features of the “lama wearing trousers”6 as he called it, which he said were obvious proof of fakery. These giveaway features included the full beard, which is not a feature of depictions of Tibetan deities, European-looking shoes rather than boots, trousers instead of robes, the unusual single earring, and a cape more Roman in appearance than ancient Tibetan. Bayer’s conclusion was that the “pseudo Tibetan” statue was a European counterfeit made sometime between 1910 and 1970, and was perhaps aimed at the lucrative Nazi memorabilia market. He believed it may have been initially sold with a claimed connection to Schäfer’s Tibetan expedition.
However, there are still one or two questions surrounding the statue. Who made it, and how did they obtain such exotic raw material to work on? Furthermore, as the meteorite that the statue was made from is extremely hard and not at all suited to producing sculptures, it has been suggested that rather than being carved, the statue was actually cast by pouring liquid meteoric iron into a mold. Because no reliable documentation of the provenance of the statue has yet been found the origins, whether 20th or 11th century, must remain in doubt, but if it was indeed chiseled from a piece of a meteorite, then it remains the only known example of a human figure carved from such material ever discovered, and as such is an extraordinarily valuable item.
NOTES
Introduction
1. “Summary Definition.”
2. Bruhns, “International.”
Chapter 2
1. “Tutankhamun: Anatomy.”
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. New York World, March 24, 1923.
Chapter 3
1. Schliemann, Troy.
2. Easton, “The Troy.”
3. Traill, Schliemann,
4. Ibid.
5. Schliemann, Troy.
Chapter 4
1. Herodotus,The Histories.
2. Roosevent and Luke, “Looting,” pp. 173-187.
3. “Curator Held.”
4. Turkish Daily News, July 14, 2006.
5. “Karum Piece.”
6. Roosevelt and Luke, “Looting.”
Chapter 5
1. Radyuhin, “Massive.”
2. Ibid.
3. Conflict Antiquities.
Chapter 6
1. Singleton, “Plunder.”
2. Povoledo, “A Trove.”
Chapter 7
1. Landesman, “The Curse.”
2. Riding, “14 Roman.”
3. Kennedy, “Not for Sale.”
4. Riding, “14 Roman.”
5. Fitz Gibbon, Why?.
6. Bailey and Ruiz, “The Silver.”
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
Chapter 8
1. Guest, The Late.
2. Lethbridge, “The Mildenhall.”
Chapter 10
1. Lawson, “Afghan.”
Chapter 11
1. Bede, Ecclesiastical.
Chapter 13
1. Honan, “A Trove.”
Chapter 14
1. “International Cooperation.”
2. “Primary Source.”
Chapter 15
1. “Mel’s Story.”
Chapter 16
1. Jones, “How.”
2. Scott-Clark and Levy, The Amber Room.
3. Scott-Clark and Levy, “Secrets.”
4. Scott-Clark and Levy, “The Amber Façade.”
5. Scott-Clark and Levy, The Amber Room.
6. Ibid.
7. Crossland, “Digging.”
8. Ibid.
Chapter 17
1. Brodie, “Persian.”
2. Crossland, “Digging.”
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. “Morgan Stanwick AG.”
6. Davies, “Nazi.”
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