The Forgeries
It was in this competitive environment that Islam Akhun emerges. In 1895 he approached the British Consul in Kashgar, Sir George Macartney, with a number of manuscripts on paper. Some were in a script similar to Brahmi and the documents were in several different formats, many bound with copper ties. Macartney purchased the documents and sent them to India in the hope that Augustus Rudolf Hoernlé, a prominent scholar of Indo-Aryan languages, would be able to decipher them.
Unknown to Macartney, Islam Akhun's partner, Ibrahim Mullah, was also selling similar items to the Russian consul Nikolai Petrovsky. He sent them to St. Petersburg to be translated. Interestingly, Ibrahim Mullah had some knowledge of Cyrillic scripts, and so he incorporated Cyrillic characters, which proved very confusing for those scholars tasked with their translation .
Hoernlé set to work trying to decipher the texts. Although he could identify some as in Brāhmī script, in his first report on these collections, he wrote of others that they were:
...written in characters which are either quite unknown to me, or with which I am too imperfectly acquainted to attempt a ready reading in the scanty leisure that my regular official duties allow me ... My hope is that among those of my fellow-labourers who have made the languages of Central Asia their speciality, there maybe some who may be able to recognize and identify the characters and language of these curious documents.Islam Akhun and his colleague continued to sell items to the British and Russian consuls. By this time, they had started to produce woodblok prints as it increased production. Macartney also sent these to Hoernlé who, in 1899, published a second report. He gave an extensive account and divided them into nine different groups based on the kind of scripts in which they were written, which resembled Kharosthi, Indian and Central Asian Brahmi, Tibetan, Uighur, Persian and Chinese. But despite his detailed analysis, Hoernle was still unable to interpret them.
Doubts were soon raised about the authenticity of the manuscripts. Questions regarding the remarkably good condition of the scripts, their fortuitous discovery and bizarre script were raised, in particular by the Swedish missionary in Kashgar, Magnus Bäcklund who had also been approached by Islam Akhun. Hoernlé discussed this issue in his 1899 report but decided in favour of their authenticity, recounting Islam Akhun's tale of the discovery of the manuscripts and documents in the ruined sites of the ancient Kingdom of Khotan in the Taklamakan desert.
How can Islam Akhun and his comparatively illiterate confederates be credited with the no mean ingenuity necessary for excogitating ? ... To sum up, the conclusion to which, with the present information, I have come, is that the scripts are genuine, and that most, if not all, of the block-prints in the Collection are also genuine antiquities, and that if any are forgeries, they can only be duplicates of others which are genuine.Read more about this topic: Islam Akhun