Post Quiz: Forgeries and the Lying Liars Who Made Them
Created | Updated Jul 29, 2018
What do you know about famous forgeries? Explore more Fake News in this quiz.
Post Quiz: Forgeries and the Lying Liars Who Made Them
Forgeries abound in all fields. Test your knowledge of faux everything.
- The 'Donation of Constantine' was an early medieval forgery in which the Emperor Constantine was said to….
- Give authority over the Church to Rome.
- Give Europe to Charlemagne.
- Give some important relics to his mother Helen.
- Give any lands discovered west of the Atlantic Ocean to France.
- An 18th-century German archaeologist, Johann Beringer, was fond of fossils. He kept finding unusual ones – bizarre stone impressions of mating frogs, for instance, or even ones with writing on them. What turned out to be the solution to the mystery of the Beringer fossils?
- Pareidolia on a grand scale.
- Forgeries by Beringer to support the new fossil theory.
- Misdating of more recent sculptures.
- Student pranks.
- In his 1834 book, The American Nations, Constantine Rafinesque claimed what?
- That he had spoken to the angel Moroni, who told him negative stories about Joseph Smith.
- That George Washington was the reincarnation of Pharaoh Amenhotep, as foretold in prophecies in the Great Pyramid.
- That he had proof of lost Atlantis somewhere off the coast of Georgia.
- That he had translated an epic poem documenting the crossing of the Bering Strait by the Lenape Indians.
- The Piltdown Man hoax was believed for 41 years. The fake fossil was made up of…
- A fish and a monkey.
- A duck's bill and an ape skull.
- An orangutan's jaw and a human skull.
- Various pieces of papier mâché.
- In 1866, Josiah Whitney claimed to have found what in Calaveras County, California?
- A golden idol near Sutter's Mill.
- Evidence of ancient frog worship.
- The oldest human skull.
- A new kind of dinosaur.
- In 1869, men working for American entrepreneur George Hull dug up a 'petrified giant' (really a stone statue) in Cardiff, New York. It wasn't hard for them to find: Hull had buried it there a year before. Soon, everybody wanted to see this 'genuine fossil.' What happened when famous showman PT Barnum found out about it?
- He hired detectives to prove it was a fake.
- He bought it for $50,000.
- He claimed it was the 'devil's work', and got preachers to attack it from pulpits.
- He created his own fake Cardiff Giant, and claimed it was the original.
- In the 1890s, the Louvre was very embarrassed when its prized Tiara of Saitaphernes was shown to be a modern forgery. It was a really pretty hat full of bas reliefs and made of a solid pound of gold. What gave it away?
- The translation of the ancient Greek that said, 'Retsina half price tonight.'
- The modern soldering, plus the fact that the dents were all in non-interesting places.
- The discovery of a letter by goldsmith Israel Rouchomovski admitting the deed.
- A devastating critical article by a Tel Aviv scholar.
- In addition to the Tiara of Saitaphernes, the Louvre also owns…
- Fake moon rocks.
- Eight Mona Lisas.
- The arms of the Winged Victory of Samothraki.
- Seven Neanderthal skulls.
- In 1925, H Rider Haggard (of all people) gave British explorer Percy Fawcett a mysterious idol said to be from lost Atlantis. Neither Haggard nor Fawcett realised that it was a fake. What did this 'find' lead Fawcett to do?
- Found a museum of Atlanean artefacts.
- Start a magazine called Popular Archaeology.
- Head to Brazil to find lost Atlantis, and never return.
- Make the movie She.
- You've heard of Konrad Kujau, who forged Hitler's diaries. What unusual case arose after his death?
- He was convicted post mortem of forging Hitler paintings.
- It turns out that he owned the real Hitler diaries.
- His estate turned out to contain genuine Rembrandts.
- His 'niece' was convicted of signing his name to art fakes, thus creating 'forged forgeries'.
Got your head swimming? Click the picture for answers.
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