Just a clever (and accidental) fate
When German sculptor Karl Weingartner sculpted a fake half-smashed Nokia-style phone with cuneiform symbols on the keypad, he was making an artistic statement in clay. He hardly knew that he would end up going viral in the worst possible way.
Pictures of Weingartner's work popped up on Facebook recently, with a bogus story about the “Babylonian Nokia” having been found by archaeologists at a dig site in Austria. People speculated that the phone might have been left behind by a time traveler, a previously-unknown advanced past civilization, or possibly by aliens.
Many people have cited the “Babylonian cell phone” as proof of Zechariah Sitchin's oddball theory that modern humans were created by aliens through genetic engineering.
This hoax is extremely irritating to Weingartner, who is seeing misattributed images of his work everywhere now, being used without his permission or credit.