Hoaxed history stuff…

OK, this isn’t strictly a cipher mystery story: but it does play to a lot of the things I think we all love (or perhaps, wearing our historian hats, love to loathe). Courtesy of Paul Morrow at the Pilipino Express, here’s the story of Jose Marco, con man of the century – a man who singlehandedly faked more or less all the interesting parts of the history of the Philippines, including “Datu Kalantiaw, the [utterly fake] first Filipino lawmaker”. This involved his creating five large manuscripts in 1914 totalling over 800 pages (all of ridiculously poor quality), plus many other wobbly fake documents. This seems to confirm the old saw that conmen don’t need to be clever, as long as they’re fractionally cleverer than their victims. 🙂

Oh, and if that doesn’t float your boat, the same writer has a nice 4-part series (in one handy PDF file) from 2009 on what he calls Da Bathala Code. This relates the story of how a (genuinely old) Filipino script called baybayin was hijacked in 1937 by a sculptor named Guillermo Tolentino, who layered all kinds of spurious pictographic interpretations on the baybayin letter shapes, to produce a fake visual etymology for the language. Tolentino in turn was building on similar nonsense put forward 50 years earlier by one Pedro Alexandro Molo Agustin Paterno y de Vera Ignacio, who had claimed that the language was (somehow) derived from Tagalog.

So… ancient scripts, fake etymology, fake (nationalist) histories, fake documents. Enjoy! 🙂