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SHAPIRA  . W . (c . 1830-1884), Polish vendor of spurious antiquities, was of Jewish birth, but appears to have become a Christian early in life . He opened a shop for the sale of antiquities in Palestine, and after the discovery of the Moabite Stone in 1872 was successful in selling to the Prussian government for 20,000 thaler a number of alleged pieces of Moabite pottery . These were shown by Clermont-Ganneau and others (cf . Kautzsch and A . Socin, Achtheit der moabitischen Altertumer, 1876) to be forgeries produced by Shapira's client Selim al-Kari . Undeterred by this exposure, Shapira continued to do a considerable trade especially in Hebrew MSS. from Yemen, but ultimately ruined himself by a fraud perpetrated upon the British Museum . In 1883 he offered, for the price, it is said, of £1,000,000, a number of leather strips containing speeches of Moses varying in many particulars from, though similar in matter to, those in Deuteronomy, and written in archaic Hebrew characters . He pretended that he had obtained them from a Bedouin who had discovered them in a Moabite cave . The fragments were submitted to C .

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Ginsburg, who published translations in The Times of Aug . 4, 17, 22, 1883 . The French government, however, sent over Clermont-Ganneau to investigate, and, though the British Museum authorities declined to give him permission to make a complete study, he satisfied himself from a few strips which were publicly exhibited that the whole collection must be a forgery (The Times, Aug . 15) . This view was con-firmed by Ginsburg's report to the Museum . Shapira, who was never shown to have been the actual forger, committed suicide in Rotterdam on the 1 rth of March 1884 . For the fragments see Guthe, Fragmenta einer Lederhandschrift (Leipzig, 1884) ; see also Clermont-Ganneau, Les Fraudes archeologiques (Paris, 1885), iii., iv .