A treasure between three capitals
Paris, 1896. The gold tiara called that of Saitaphernes is in the Louvre and is presented as an ancient object. Antoine Heron de Villefosse, author of an account presented to the Academy, admires its freshness, the scale of its composition and its historical interest. If the object is modern, the judgment of scholars and the trust placed in the museum are also at stake.
Heron writes that the tiara was discovered in southern Russia and that its inscription names the ancient city of Olbia. That sentence gives the object a place and a history, but it describes neither a controlled excavation, an exact site nor a chain from the reported discovery to the museum.
Salomon Reinach's retrospective account adds an examination in Vienna. The archaeologists Benndorf, R. von Schneider, Hoernes and Bormann study the tiara at leisure and declare it authentic. They do not buy it because the asking price of 70,000 florins is beyond their means, not because they recognized it as a forgery.
The same Reinach reports that at the British Museum, Murray instead distrusts the alleged provenance. Hochmann has failed in Lemberg and Vienna before Vogel and Szymanski continue the campaign. From one capital to another, the object therefore meets a declaration of authenticity, a prohibitive price and doubt about its story, with no checkable provenance to decide between those reactions.
Clipped editorial summary based on H01, H02, S01, S02. Antoine Héron de Villefosse, ‘La tiare du roi Saïtapharnès’, CRAI 40-2 (1896), pp. 136-137; manual transcription and Clipped translation. Salomon Reinach, ‘La tiare de Saïtapharnès’, L’Anthropologie XIV (1903), pp. 240-246; manual transcription and Clipped translation; MOM scan pixels excluded. Locators: H01 (pp. 136-137, phrase continued across page break) ; H02 (p. 137, first full paragraph) ; S01 (p. 240, final main paragraph) ; S02 (p. 241, paragraph 2). No source pixels or institutional OCR are reused; judgments remain attributed.