One of the statues was a fragment which consisted of little more than the throne upon which the Queen sat. This fragment is now lost, but a copy of the inscription was made and is preserved to this day. The second of this pair of statues is the one in the British Museum.
Dr. Davies noticed that some of the characters in the inscription were badly formed, a frequent clue that an inscription was carved in modern times (by someone who actually could not read hieroglyphs). When he compared the inscription on the statue in the British Museum to the copy of the inscription on the "lost" statue, he noticed another problem.
On the lost statue, the inscription on the Queen's throne is broken off in the lower left corner. If you look at the photo in this article, you will see that the statue in the British Museum is also damaged in the same spot on the Queen's throne. But on the British Museum's statue, the damage is not caused by a break in the stone; instead, it looks like a chisel was used to remove a portion of the inscription.
It seems odd that two statues would have a damaged inscription in the same place and that the damage on one of the statues would look to have been deliberately done. Dr. Davies theory is that the broken statue had an inscription that was real, and that a forger copied the inscription onto the (previously uninscribed) statue that is now in the British Museum. Since the forger did not know hieroglyphs, he damaged the inscription in the lower left corner to hide the fact that he did not know what characters the original inscription contained there.
So, if the inscription is a fake (and I think that it is), does that mean that the statue is a fake as well? Or is the statue a real antiquity and only the inscription is forged?
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No the statuette is a modern forgery and has been scientifically verified in terms of tool- mark analysis, SEM- EDS,etc,.And stylistically analysed as well, note shifted body position, and gaze, other anomalies: double straps on the dress, the exposed breasts, the short wig, unusual composition of headdress. The inscription of the damaged Cairo piece, which is higher quality and execution, its hieroglyphic inscription damaged in same corner as forger who damaged the statuette because he could not read Middle Egyptian. The BM statuette contains several linguistic mistakes and errors besides, that correspond to the damaged ( and missing parts) on the Cairo piece which is now missing (Davies, 1984). Additionally modern chemical analysis determined that the body and headdress paint contains barium sulphate, a chemical substance not available within ancient Egyptian contexts. A dead giveaway of modern forgery as well ( Davies, 1984; Gabor 2018). So modern forgery produced in the later 1880’s at Luxor (Jones, 1990). According to Davies, there is a slight possibility that the figure itself might be authentic, but it has been subjected to reverse engineering in terms of modern decoration, so more research needs to be done on her facial features because they themselves are not unconventional for the period as Davies notes (1984). However, it also must be noted that 19 th- century forgers in Egypt and Europe were extremely sophisticated. They often invaded the Amarna tombs and others to copy the images, they also obtained catalogues of museum pieces to gain exact images to mimic the features of the royal statuary they wished to create. The Egyptian dealers like. Mohammed Mohasseb who sold Tetisheri to Wallis Budge, the curator of the BM, were very adept at enticing collectors, consuls, and curators of the time who often ignored the necessity of validating authenticity in the drive to supply the increasing demand for Egyptian sculpture to satisfy both National State Museums and private collectors on both sides of the English Channel. They often trusted the dealers they relied upon too much, because the dealers sold them authentic objects as well, and then slipped in ones that were specifically carved to satisfy the market demand for these objects.
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