Konstantinos Simonides

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Konstantinos Simonides (* 1820 on Symi ; † 1890 (?)) Was a Greek impostor and forger, primarily of ancient text documents and papyri .

Life

According to the biographical sketch that Alexandros Lykourgos created for his book Revelations about Simonides-Dindorf's Uranios on the basis of statements by Simonides himself, Simonides worked in the print shop of a well-known bookseller in 1837 and later came to his uncle Benedictos, who was head of the monastery in which Konstantinos Simonides came into contact with old manuscripts. To this maternal uncle he allegedly owed some writings with which he succeeded in Athens in 1846 and which were submitted to a commission of the Greek Ministry of Culture for examination. In 1850 he published a description of the island of Kefalonia , which should come from the 4th century AD. After checking the style and content, the text was revealed to be a forgery. In 1850 he moved to Constantinople , where he was able to win over some diplomats and dignitaries who enabled him to excavate at the local hippodrome . In 1853 he traded real and forged manuscripts in England and came to Leipzig in 1855. There he tried to sell an alleged Egyptian royal story of Uranios, which Lykourgos and Konstantin von Tischendorf identified as a forgery. He went to jail for it. A few years later, Simonides wanted to take revenge on Tischendorf and claimed that he had the Codex Sinaiticus (this Greek Bible manuscript dates from the 4th century AD, is the oldest completely preserved manuscript of the New Testament and was published by Tischendorf in 1844 and 1859 St. Catherine's Monastery discovered on Sinai) on Mount Athos itself. English newspapers took up these accusations uncritically. Konstantin von Tischendorf refuted these insane allegations in his two writings, The Contestations of the Sinai Bible and Arms of Darkness Against the Sinai Bible (both published in Leipzig in 1863). Simonides later fled to Egypt.

Fakes

One of his well-known falsifications was the so-called Symais , a story of the High School of Symi , which depicts this university as the place of work of ancient masters who are said to have succeeded in inventing paper , the telescope and steam-powered speedboats , among other things .

method

Simonides made use of the fact that real ancient texts are occasionally passed down as so-called palimpsests and thus some manuscripts can contain traces of even older original texts that were overwritten with other content in later times in order to save expensive writing material. For his forgeries, he added some sensational reports on genuine, old papyrus fragments with philological acumen and pale ink, which were intended to give the scholars of his time the impression that they were chronologically before the original and undoubtedly genuine text.

Recent developments

The Italian philologist Luciano Canfora speculated that the Artemidor papyrus , which was completely scientifically processed for the first time in 2008, was also a forgery by Simonides. This accusation could be rejected by the scientific community. At a colloquium co-organized by Canfora in 2009, an Italian police officer accused the scientists of having fallen for a digital document forgery. This accusation was also refuted by a presentation at the University of Cologne in 2010.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Uranĭos . In: Heinrich August Pierer , Julius Löbe (Hrsg.): Universal Lexicon of the Present and the Past . 4th edition. tape 18 . Altenburg 1864, p. 275 ( zeno.org ).
  2. ^ Ragnar K. Kinzelbach: The Artemidor papyrus. Animal pictures from the first century. A zoological commentary on the Artemidor papyrus. In: Archives for Papyrus Research and Related Areas. Supplement 28. Verlag Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2009, ISBN 978-3-11-022580-8 . P. 1.
  3. ↑ University of Cologne: Expert refutes falsification allegation. ( Memento of September 12, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) September 8, 2010, accessed on August 22, 2012.
  4. ↑ The story of a gifted impostor. In: Tages-Anzeiger . July 26, 2011.


personal data
SURNAME Simonides, Konstantinos
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Greek forger of ancient texts
DATE OF BIRTH 1820
PLACE OF BIRTH Symi
DATE OF DEATH uncertain: 1890