What are first impressions worth? The first time I saw "The JoashI don't dispute that this is a forgery. But the surprisingly good preservation of an ancient text is a poor argument, according to which you would have to classify such important finds as the Mesha inscription (Moabite Stone), the Rosetta Stone and the Qumran Isaiah scroll as forgeries, for they are all easily read by the naked eye.
Inscription" was the image found at Giuseppe Regalzi's excellent web site:
http://www.orientalisti.net/ioash.htm
My immediate reaction to the visual data? It looks too good to be true.
Reading some of the articles linked to this page I ran into the following
quote from *R.Altman:
quote:
Every element of the tablet is clear; one neither requires a transcription
to read the text nor needs other equipment to examine the tablet. The
technical term for a forgery that can be seen by the eye without special
equipment is "blatant."
:end quote
The word "blatant" captures my immediate subjective reaction quiet nicely.
Of course, immediate subjective reactions are not "science" but having
several decades of experience with con artists this stone looks
superficially like a clumsy attempt to "pull a fast one."
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