The District Court of Jerusalem indictment last December named Golan and four co-defendants in forgeries of items ranging from more than two dozen bullae -- clay relics used to seal documents from the time of King Solomon -- to the ossuary and the "Jehoash Inscription," an ancient tablet purported to be the 2,800-year-old instructions for maintaining the Jewish temple in Jerusalem.
In all, the indictment lists 13 counts of fraud and forgery, as well as additional counts against Golan alone for suborning perjury, obstructing justice, possessing stolen property and illegal sale of antiquities. Bringer said the case is scheduled for trial May 17.
Shanks did not address the range of Golan's alleged transgressions, but he noted in a telephone interview that as one of Israel's leading antiquities collectors, "he has 3,000 pieces. Even if he's a forger, all 3,000 aren't forgeries."
And Shanks has maintained throughout the dispute that the Antiquities Authority "has not made the case" for fraud. Its key contention -- that Golan used a high-temperature chalk-and-water mixture to amateurishly "age" the inscription with an artificial patina -- "is deeply flawed," he said.
The authority's report says that "the inscription was inscribed or cleaned in a modern period," but Shanks pointed out that the investigation never seriously examined "the innocent hypothesis" -- that someone had washed the inscription and left a detergent residue embedded in the letters.
Authority investigators are not buying it: "I did an examination which showed the patina was not created in a natural way. The conclusions are clear," Avner Ayalon of the Israel Geological Survey said in a telephone interview. "These ideas that Shanks is trying to plant are beyond me."
Shanks also enlisted geologist James A. Harrell, an expert in archaeological stone who works for the University of Toledo, to examine the authority's evidence. Harrell, in a telephone interview, said he found it "not good enough."
Besides the possibility that the inscription had been cleaned, Harrell noted that chalk does not dissolve well in hot water and would not provide a convincing patina. The authority's evidence is "weakly reasoned and full of errors. It may be correct, but there's no reason to trust it at this point."
The authority's Dahari dismissed Harrell as "a charlatan" and Golan as "a crook, a scoundrel" who should be put on trial for his alleged crimes. "He claims to be one of the big collectors of antiquities in Israel," Dahari said. "Where did he have the money to get all of it? It's all from forgery."
Gugliotta reported from Washington and Sockol from Jerusalem.
