Shapira said the strips had been found east of the Dead Sea and offered them to the British Museum for a large sum in 1883; portions were briefly exhibited to great public interest. The French orientalist Charles Clermont-Ganneau and the museum's Christian David Ginsburg examined them and judged them modern forgeries, with Clermont-Ganneau suggesting they had been cut from the blank lower margins of old Torah scrolls and artificially aged. The verdict destroyed Shapira's reputation; he left London and took his own life in Rotterdam in March 1884. The strips were auctioned at Sotheby's in 1885 for a small sum, passed to a collector, and then vanished from the record. No photographs of professional quality, and certainly no modern scientific analysis, survive, only nineteenth-century transcriptions, hand copies, and drawings, which are now the whole of the evidence.
Moses Wilhelm Shapira, a Jerusalem antiquities dealer, presented the Shapira Strips, blackened leather fragments inscribed in palaeo-Hebrew script and said to be from east of the Dead Sea in Transjordan, to European scholars in 1883, claiming they represented an ancient, pre-exilic text closely related to Deuteronomy. The British Museum's own expert, the epigrapher Christian David Ginsburg, initially found the fragments plausible before French scholar Charles Clermont-Ganneau, after examining them, declared them a modern forgery, a verdict the wider scholarly community of the time accepted; Shapira, his reputation destroyed, died by suicide in the Netherlands in 1884. The fragments themselves disappeared from the historical record after being sold at a London auction in 1885, and their present whereabouts, if they survive at all, are unknown.