WThe Arslan Tash amulets are talismans found at Arslan Tash in northwest Syria, the site of ancient Hadatu. They are to be distinguished from larger finds such as the Arslan Tash reliefs. The inscriptions on the tablets are known as KAI 27.
WThe Bat Creek inscription is an inscribed stone collected as part of a Native American burial mound excavation in Loudon County, Tennessee, in 1889 by the Smithsonian Bureau of Ethnology's Mound Survey, directed by entomologist Cyrus Thomas. The inscriptions were initially described as Cherokee, but in 2004, similarities to an inscription that was circulating in a Freemason book were discovered. Hoax expert Kenneth Feder says the peer reviewed work of Mary L. Kwas and Robert Mainfort has "demolished" any claims of the stone's authenticity. Mainfort and Kwas themselves state "The Bat Creek stone is a fraud."
WBords de la Seine à Argenteuil is an oil painting controversially not accepted by the Wildenstein Institute which publishes the catalogue raisonné of works by Claude Monet. The painting is a landscape depicting the River Seine at Argenteuil in France. It is owned by Englishman David Joel.
WThe Burney Relief is a Mesopotamian terracotta plaque in high relief of the Isin-Larsa period or Old-Babylonian period, depicting a winged, nude, goddess-like figure with bird's talons, flanked by owls, and perched upon two lions.
WThe Casket letters were eight letters and some sonnets said to have been written by Mary, Queen of Scots, to the Earl of Bothwell, between January and April 1567. They were produced as evidence against Queen Mary by the Scottish lords who opposed her rule. In particular, the text of the letters was taken to imply that Queen Mary colluded with Bothwell in the murder of her husband, Lord Darnley. Mary's contemporary supporters, including Adam Blackwood, dismissed them as complete forgeries or letters written by the Queen's servant Mary Beaton. The authenticity of the letters, now known only by copies, continues to be debated. Some historians argue that they were forgeries concocted in order to discredit Queen Mary and ensure that Queen Elizabeth I supported the kingship of the infant James VI of Scotland, rather than his mother. The historian John Hungerford Pollen, in 1901, by comparing two genuine letters drafted by Mary, presented a subtle argument that the various surviving copies and translations of the casket letters could not be used as evidence of their original authorship by Mary.
WThe Dark Tower is an incomplete manuscript allegedly written by C. S. Lewis that appears to be an unfinished sequel to the science fiction novel Out of the Silent Planet. Perelandra instead became the second book of Lewis' Space Trilogy, concluded by That Hideous Strength. Walter Hooper, Lewis' literary executor, titled the fragment and published it in the 1977 collection The Dark Tower and Other Stories. Lewis scholar Kathryn Lindskoog challenged the authenticity of the work. For convenience, the author of the text is referred to in this article as "Lewis" without qualification.
WThe Diary of a Young Girl, also known as The Diary of Anne Frank, is a book of the writings from the Dutch-language diary kept by Anne Frank while she was in hiding for two years with her family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. The family was apprehended in 1944, and Anne Frank died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945. The diary was retrieved by Miep Gies, who gave it to Anne's father, Otto Frank, the family's only known survivor, just after the war was over. The diary has since been published in more than 60 languages. First published under the title Het Achterhuis. Dagboekbrieven 14 Juni 1942 – 1 Augustus 1944 by Contact Publishing in Amsterdam in 1947, the diary received widespread critical and popular attention on the appearance of its English language translation Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Doubleday & Company and Vallentine Mitchell in 1952. Its popularity inspired the 1955 play The Diary of Anne Frank by the screenwriters Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, which they adapted for the screen for the 1959 movie version. The book is included in several lists of the top books of the 20th century.
WAbraham (Avraham) ben Samuel Firkovich (1786–1874) was a famous Karaite writer and archaeologist, collector of ancient manuscripts, and a Karaite Hakham. He was born in Lutsk, Volhynia, then lived in Lithuania, and finally settled in Çufut Qale, Crimea. Gabriel Firkovich of Troki was his son-in-law.
WThe Glozel artifacts are a collection of over 3,000 artifacts, including clay tablets, sculptures and vases, some of which were inscribed, discovered from 1924 to 1930 in the vicinity of French hamlet of Glozel. Glozel is part of the commune of Ferrières-sur-Sichon, Le Mayet-de-Montagne, Allier, some 17 km from Vichy in central France.
WThe Historia Augusta is a late Roman collection of biographies, written in Latin, of the Roman emperors, their junior colleagues, designated heirs and usurpers from 117 to 284. Supposedly modeled on the similar work of Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, it presents itself as a compilation of works by six different authors, written during the reigns of Diocletian and Constantine I and addressed to those emperors or other important personages in Ancient Rome. The collection, as extant, comprises thirty biographies, most of which contain the life of a single emperor, but some include a group of two or more, grouped together merely because these emperors were either similar or contemporaneous.
WHuman image synthesis is technology that can be applied to make believable and even photorealistic renditions of human-likenesses, moving or still. It has effectively existed since the early 2000s. Many films using computer generated imagery have featured synthetic images of human-like characters digitally composited onto the real or other simulated film material. Towards the end of the 2010s deep learning artificial intelligence has been applied to synthesize images and video that look like humans, without need for human assistance, once the training phase has been completed, whereas the old school 7D-route required massive amounts of human work.
WThe Isleworth Mona Lisa is an early sixteenth-century oil on canvas painting depicting the same subject as Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, though with the subject depicted as being a younger age. The painting is thought to have been brought from Italy to England in the 1780s, and came into public view in 1913 when the English connoisseur Hugh Blaker acquired it from a manor house in Somerset, where it was thought to have been hanging for over a century. Since the 1910s, a number of experts in various fields, as well as the collectors who have acquired ownership of the painting, have asserted that the major elements of the painting are the work of Leonardo himself, as an earlier version of the Mona Lisa.
WThe Ivanhorod Einsatzgruppen photograph is an image of the Holocaust, showing a soldier aiming a rifle at a woman who is trying to shield a child with her body. It depicts the murder of Jews by an Einsatzgruppen death squad near Ivanhorod, Ukraine, in 1942. The photograph was mailed, intercepted by the Polish resistance in Warsaw, and kept by Jerzy Tomaszewski. In the 1960s, it was alleged that the image was a Communist forgery, but that claim was debunked. Since then, the photograph has been frequently used in books, museums, and exhibitions relating to the Holocaust. Photograph historian Janina Struk describes it as "a symbol of the barbarity of the Nazi regime and their industrial scale murder of 6 million European Jews."
WThe James Ossuary is a 1st-century limestone box that was used for containing the bones of the dead. An Aramaic inscription in the Hebrew alphabet meaning "James (Jacob), son of Joseph, brother of Jesus" is cut into one side of the box. The ossuary attracted scholarly attention due to its apparent association with the Christian holy family. However, while the ossuary itself is accepted as authentic to the time period, the inscription itself could be a modern forgery.
WThe Jordan Lead Codices,, are a collection of codices allegedly found in a cave in Jordan and first publicized in March 2011. A number of scholars and a November 2012 regional BBC News investigation have pronounced them fakes. In December 2016, a radioactivity test performed at the University of Surrey's Ion Beam Centre confirmed the old age of the lead used, but not the inscriptions. As of 2017, both the Israeli Antiquities Authority (IAA) and the Jordanian archaeological department regard them as forgeries.
WThe Mar Saba letter is a Greek document which scholar Morton Smith reported in 1973 that he had discovered in the library of the Mar Saba monastery in 1958. The document has been lost and now only survives in two sets of photographs. The text purports to be an epistle of Clement of Alexandria and contains the only known references to a "Secret Gospel of Mark".
WThe Maya Codex of Mexico (MCM) is a Maya screenfold manuscript of a pre-Columbian type. Long known as the Grolier Codex or Sáenz Codex, in 2018 it was officially renamed the Códice Maya de México (CMM) by the National Institute of Anthropology and History of Mexico. It is one of only four known extant Maya codices, and the only one that still resides in the Americas.
WThe Memoirs of Naim Bey: Turkish Official Documents Relating to the Deportation and the Massacres of Armenians, containing the Talat Pasha telegrams, is a book published by historian and journalist Aram Andonian in 1919. Originally redacted in Armenian, it was popularized worldwide through the English edition published by Hodder & Stoughton of London. It includes several documents (telegrams) that constitute evidence that the Armenian Genocide was formally implemented as Ottoman Empire policy.
WThe Nebra sky disk is a bronze disk of around 30 centimeters diameter and a weight of 2.2 kilograms (4.9 lb), having a blue-green patina and inlaid with gold symbols. These symbols are interpreted generally as the Sun or full moon, a lunar crescent, and stars. Two golden arcs along the sides, interpreted to mark the angle between the solstices, were added later. A final addition was another arc at the bottom surrounded with multiple strokes.
WThe Praeneste fibula is a golden fibula or brooch, today housed in the Museo Preistorico Etnografico Luigi Pigorini in Rome. The fibula bears an inscription in Old Latin, claiming craftsmanship by one Manios and ownership by one Numazios. At the time of its discovery in the late nineteenth century, it was accepted as the earliest known specimen of the Latin language. The authenticity of the inscription has since been disputed. However a new analysis performed in 2011 declared it to be genuine "beyond any reasonable doubt" and to date from the Orientalizing period, in the first half of the seventh century BC.
WThe Prophecy of the Popes is a series of 112 short, cryptic phrases in Latin which purport to predict the Roman Catholic popes, beginning with Celestine II. It was first published in 1595 by Benedictine monk Arnold Wion, who attributed the prophecy to Saint Malachy, a 12th-century archbishop of Armagh.
WThe Stela of Akhenaten and his family is the name for an altar image in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo which depicts the Pharaoh Akhenaten, his queen Nefertiti, and their three children. The limestone stela with the inventory number JE 44865 is 43.5 × 39 cm in size and was discovered by Ludwig Borchardt in Haoue Q 47 at Tell-el Amarna in 1912. When the archaeological finds from Tell-el Amarna were divided on 20 January 1913, Gustave Lefebvre chose this object on behalf of the Egyptian Superintendency for Antiquities instead of the Bust of Nefertiti.
WTitulus Crucis is a piece of wood kept in the Church of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme in Rome which is claimed to be the titulus of the True Cross on which Jesus was crucified. It is venerated by some Catholics as a relic associated with Jesus. It is generally either ignored by scholars or considered to be a medieval forgery.
WThe Vinland map is claimed to be a 15th-century mappa mundi with unique information about Norse exploration of North America. It became well-known due to the publicity campaign which accompanied its revelation to the public as a "genuine" pre-Columbian map in 1965. In addition to showing Africa, Asia and Europe, the map depicts a landmass south-west of Greenland in the Atlantic labelled as Vinland.