In 1988, wood fragments found with Pastor Murray is the scholar who finally translated the inscription. The cornerstone of this reconstruction is at present the Bat Creek inscription because it was found in an unimpeachable archaeological context under the direction of professional archaeologists working for the prestigious Smithsonian Institution.". Fel1, Barry McCulloch, J. Huston (1993b). 2013 Gregory . 1-16, rejoinder by M&K, TA Fall More conclusive evidence regarding the stone's authenticity comes from two additional sources. The sign is quite similar to the Cherokee "ga" regardless of the orientation of the stone. The apparent age of the inscription suggested to Thomas that the Cherokee possessed a written language prior to the invention of the Cherokee syllabary invented by Sequoyah around 1820. or "dh ' 7NESb" in Thomas's orientation. disguise his or her source. [1], The stone itself is 11.4 centimeters (4.5 inches) long and 5.1 centimeters (2.0 inches) wide. Paleo-Hebrew of approximately the first or second century There is no way this subtle 1958 The Kensington Stone; A Mystery Solved. 1974 Fort Michilimackinac 1715-1781: an Anthropological Perspective on the Revolutionary Frontier. Schroedl, Gerald F. [7] The Myth of the Mound-builders is a damaging belief that discredits Native American peoples by claiming they were not the creators of the phenomenal mounds, and another group of people, frequently referred to as a "Vanished Race", are responsible for their creation and persisting splendor. is not unlikely that Mound #3's trees were of the same type. These signs have been identified by Gordon (1971, 1972, 1974; see Mahan [1971]) as Paleo-Hebrew letters of the period circa A.D. 100; McCulloch (1988) suggests the first century A.D. 1979 Canaanites in America: a New Scripture in Stone? Gordon, pp. Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin No. Serenwen (undated). Considering his initial enthusiasm (Thomas 1890, 1894), to say nothing of the potential significance of the artifact - if authentic - to American archaeology, the conspicuous absence of the stone from his later publications suggests to us that Thomas later may have come to recognize the Bat Creek stone as a fraud. A 3-foot black oak tree still stood on David and Charles, Newton Abbot. Likewise, the presence of this string on undoubtedly working from a newly-available Robert Stieglitz (1976) confirmed Gordon's reading of the [2], North America has a vast and significant history, a "rich history" that belongs to "sophisticated Native American civilizations" and pre-dates the introduction of European settler colonialism. LYHW- on both the Yehucal bulla and the Masonic illustration Fowke, Gerard Thomas, Cyrus and W.J. 2006): 16-27, 70. "belonging to Yehucal" (Mazar 2006: 26). excavation was made there was an old rotten stump yet on The inscribed stone was found in an undisturbed Hopewell burial mound along the Little Tennessee River near the mouth of Bat Creek. [5] McCarter concluded, "It seems probable that we are dealing here not with a coincidental similarity but with a fraud". In Macoy's illustration, this is clearly meant to be a qoph, MinnesotaHistorical Society, St. Paul. publish the details fact there is already a D on Bat Creek, at the end of the second word, 1-2. 1970b Prof Says Jews Found America. 47, Issue. Masonic Publishing Co., New York, 3rd ed., 1868, p. 134. Mound 2 was a burial mound approximately 3 m tall and 13 m in diameter. A Coelbren alphabet is provided online by 1972 The Bat Creek Inscription. [4] He went on to claim, "it does not by itself indicate anything more than a minimal contact with the New World by a few Hebrew sailors". 1-2), Gordon was quoted as saying that: "Various pieces of evidence point in the direction of migrations (to North America) from the Mediterranean in Roman times. Pp 181, This page was last edited on 15 March 2023, at 01:56. and other considerations, was A.M. Kelley, New York. be abandoned. We believe that Emmert's motive for producing (or causing to have made) the Bat Creek inscription was that he felt the best way to insure permanent employment with the Mound Survey was to find an outstanding artifact, and how better to impress Cyrus Thomas than to "find" an object that would prove Thomas' hypothesis that the Cherokee built most of the mounds in eastern Tennessee? [1] This specific volume was "extensively reprinted during the latter half of the nineteenth century", and would have been available to the forger. 1907 Cherokee. The Bat Creek inscription (also called the Bat Creek stone or Bat Creek tablet) is an inscribed stone collected as part of a Native American burial mound excavation in Loudon County, Tennessee, in 1889 by the Smithsonian Bureau of Ethnology's Mound Survey, directed by entomologist Cyrus Thomas.The inscriptions were initially described as Cherokee, but in 2004, similarities to an inscription . Gordon, Cyrus, "Stone Inscription Found in Tennessee Proves that America was Discovered 1500 Years before Columbus," Argosy Magazine, Jan. 1971a. Our mission is to defend, protect, and preserve free speech online for all people. 1978 The Composition of the Copper Alloys Used by the Greek, Etruscan, and Roman Civilizations. inscriptions are also clearly different, the Bat Creek 1982. 54-55 ff., "The Translation" with Dr. Arnold Murray, Shepherd's Chapel, a Special Documentary, in which Dr. Arnold takes us to Louden Co, TN, the Bat Creek Stone location, providing the only ACCURATE translation of this Ancient Paleo-Hebrew writing over 2000 years old right here in the great USA! Antiquity 43(170):150-51. Unlocking the Mystery of the Two Prophets, For Our Day: Divinely Sanctioned Governments. Lambert, W.G. [16] It has subsequently been loaned to the Museum of the Cherokee Indian in Cherokee, N.C., where it has been on display since 2015. [2] According to the American Petrographic Services' evaluation of the stone, the marks are characterized by smooth, "rounded grooves". 12/29/05. [7] The forced removal of Native peoples from their land and the severing of Native people from their heritage was partially enacted by "destroying indigenous pyramid mounds" and "The creation of the Myth of the Mounds". For example, Stone's (1974) magnum opus on Fort Michilimackinac does not discuss the chemical composition of any of the thousands of artifacts recovered, and misidentifies as "copper" a number of kettle lugs (pp. The University of Iowa, Iowa City. ). Jefferson Chapman, Director of the McClung Museum at the University of Tennessee, generously provided copies of unpublished reports and correspondence by and pertaining to John Emmert. The Book of the Descendants of Doctor Benjamin Lee and Dorothy Gordon, Refugees Escape to Tennessee? Bat Creek Mound #3, with the inscription He reported that the Bat Creek Stone was found under the skull of the south-facing skeleton. Before exploring this issue, we will state that we have no unequivocal data to present. American Indian, Heye Foundation, New York. American Anthropologist 12:337-343. scholar Cyrus Gordon (1971a, 1971b, 1972) confirmed that it is Semitic, Silverberg, Robert As we discuss below, the Bat Creek stone received scant attention from Thomas's contemporaries and languished in relative obscurity (but see Mertz 1964) until 1970 when it was "rediscovered" by Cyrus Gordon, a well-published professor of Mediterranean Studies at Brandeis University and a leading proponent of cult archaeology. The clay canoe-shaped coffin containing an extended burial and surrounded by four seated burials, which also came from Long Island, remains a unique occurrence. of the Serenwen alphabet to the Bat Creek letters. in this alphabet, or what Welsh words they find there. See also comment As noted above, the Bat Creek stone has recently been cast into greater prominence as a result of an AMS radiocarbon determination. Many fraudulent antiquities appeared (Williams 1990), adding fuel to these already heated controversies; among the more well-known examples are the Davenport tablets and elephant pipes (McCussick 1970), the Kennsington runestone (Blegen 1968; Wahlgren 1958), the Calaveras skull (Dexter 1986), and the Holly Oak pendant (Griffin et al_. makes most sense as an inverted (rho-wise) resh, as The latter was inextricably linked to the Moundbuilder debate (Silverberg 1968). photograph, instead appeared to be ancient Semitic. The Little Tennessee River enters Tennessee from the Appalachian Mountains to the south and flows northward for just over 50 miles (80km) before emptying into the Tennessee River near Lenoir City. Gordon, Cyrus, Before Columbus (New York, Crown, 1971b), Appendix. 88 (Sept. 2010). This ratio of copper to zinc is In the 1960s, Henriette Mertz and Corey Ayoob both The Bat Creek Stone: A Reply to Mainfort and Kwas, "Report on the Mound Explorations of the Bureau of Ethnology". McCulloch 1988), virtually identical brasses were produced in England during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Day 1973; Shaw and Craddock 1984). even among Celtic enthusiasts, In: Archaeology of the Eastern United States, edited by J.B. Griffin, pp. At the time the The Bat Creek Stone was recovered during a professional archaeological dig by John W. Emmert of the Smithsonian Institutions Bureau of Ethnology in 1889, during its Mound Survey Project. Arundale (1981) has offered a number of precautions relative to the interpretation of radiocarbon dates. Smithsonian Institution, Bureauof American Ethnology, Bulletin No. Anonymous Yet, even as the Davenport finds "proved too much" with respect to pre-Columbian Old World contacts, so too did the Bat Creek stone "prove too much" regarding Thomas's own pet hypothesis that the immediate ancestors of the Cherokee constructed most of the burial mounds in eastern North America. Ignoring our own interpretations and relying solely on Gordon, the occurrence of 3 signs that are unquestionably not Paleo-Hebrew (to say nothing of the admitted difficulties with several others) is sufficient grounds to rule out the Bat Creek inscription as genuine Paleo-Hebrew. This of course begs the question of why Thomas did not admit to the failings of his magnum opus in a more direct manner. The match to Cherokee is no The common prefix L- simply [1] The two bracelets found in the Mound were initially identified by both Emmert and Thomas as "copper", but a 1970 Smithsonian analysis concluded the bracelets were in fact heavily leaded yellow brass. The Bat Creek Stone remains the property of the Smithsonian Institution, and is catalogued in the collections of the Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, NMNH catalog number 8013771 and original US National Museum number A134902-0. reply Up Bat Creek (Without a Paddle): Mormon Assessment of the Bat Creek Stone. [1] This interpretation was accepted at the time but was contested about a century later by Cyrus H. Gordon, a scholar of Near Eastern Cultures and ancient languages, who reexamined the tablet in the 1970s and proposed that the inscription represented Paleo-Hebrew of the 1st or 2nd century. missing on Bat Creek. The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison. and 9 burials, was "of small size, measuring but 28 feet Gordon claimed that by inverting the orientation of the stone relative to the published illustrations (i.e., Thomas 1890, 1894), it was clear that the inscription contained Paleo-Hebrew characters that could be translated as "for the Jews" or some variant thereof. And where was this stone recovered? It also seems worth mentioning that Cyrus Thomas was neither the first nor the last archaeologist to be taken in by a questionable artifact. American Antiquity 51(2):365-369. ), Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, p. 610. approximate site, possibly making a complete loop iii: This sign is impossible as Paleo-Hebrew in the period 100 B.C.-A.D. 100 based on the shape and stance; Gordon identifies this sign as "he." Whiteford (1952:218), in a reference to the Bat Creek stone, mentions an "enigmatic engraved stone," while sharply criticizing the eastern Tennessee research conducted under Thomas' direction and questioning the authenticity of some of the archaeological features reported by John Emmert. The January/February 2006 This conclusion is based on assessments by two Near Eastern language specialists, one of whom (Cyrus Gordon) considers some (but not all) of the signs to be Paleo-Hebrew. Mertz, Henriette 1894) never offered a translation of the inscription. 1974 A History of American Archaeology. Concluding Remarks The authors particularly thank Frank Moore Cross, Hancock Professor of Hebrew and Other Oriental Languages at Harvard University, for providing us with his professional assessment of the signs on the Bat Creek stone. 1993, pp. Hebrew scholar and archaeologist and Kwas article, enumerating these The C-shaped brass bracelets that were apparently found under the skull or mandible of Burial 1 (Thomas 1894:393) have been cited by some cult archaeology writers as additional evidence of pre-Columbian contacts and thus supporting their claims of authenticity for the Bat Creek stone (e.g., McCulloch 1988; Mahan [1983:57] contends that "a conscious effort was made to obscure the results of the [metallurgical] tests" by the Smithsonian Institution). 87-93. Pocket Books, New York. 118. The Bat Creek stone (Catalogue No. East Lansing. 1981 Radiocarbon Dating in Eastern Arctic Archaeology: a Flexible Approach. The latter is the Aramaic designation and appears only in Aramaic scripts. ABSTRACT von Wuthenau, Alexander 1991 Fantastic Archaeology: The Wild Side of North American Prehistory. [5], Today, the probable source used by the forger to create the inscription has been identified, yet the question of who made the tablet and why remains unanswered. [1][2] This is evident by the lack of the markings in the first photograph of the stone, published in the 18901891 annual report of the Bureau of Ethnology, and their appearance in photos after 1970. Find info on Scientific Research and Development Services companies in , including financial statements, sales and marketing contacts, top competitors, and firmographic insights. Dalton claims that the Sacred Stone is a revealed translation of the Rosetta Stone, even though the actual Egyptian translation of the stone into English is well known. 5-18. separated by a dot or short diagonal stroke The Origins and Early Use of Brass. However, Wilson et al. http://druidry.org/obod/lore/coelbren/coelbren.html. 19, pp. "Only for Judea," The potential significance of the Bat Creek stone rests primarily on the decipherment of the 8 characters inscribed upon it. however, reflect on the Mound Survey's data-collecting The Bat Creek stone is a relatively flat, thin piece of ferruginous siltstone, approximately 11.4 cm long and 5.1 cm wide. There are, however, a number of unpublished documents that shed some light on the issue. No reference to the stone appears in the following significant publications: Gilbert (1943), Harrington (1922), Hodge (1907), Mooney (1892, 1900, 1907), Moorehead (1910, 1914), Setzler and Jennings (1941), Shetrone (1930), Swanton (1946, 1952), and Webb (1938). The sign is impossible for Paleo-Hebrew. Knoxville. reply by JHM BAR Nov./Dec. That Gordon's penchant for pre-Columbian contacts lies outside mainstream scholarly research is evident in the following: "No politically astute member of the establishment who prizes his professional reputation is likely to risk his good name for the sake of a truth that his peers (and therefore the public) may not be prepared to accept for fifty or a hundred years" (Gordon 1974:20). ancient times, were clearly engraved in Coelbren letters, The brass used to form the bracelets from Bat Creek contains 66.5 - 68.2 percent copper and 26.5 - 27.5 percent zinc. The Cherokees in Pre-Columbian Times, N.D.C. A further complication is that it is widely believed, [5] Mainfort and Kwas have identified the source of the inscription. Note that we do not contend that these signs are Cherokee - only that there are some formal similarities (McKussick [1979] incorrectly asserts that the signs actually are a form of Cherokee). inverted from Thomas's orientation to that of the above Bat Creek Stone - (The Translation) - The Shepherd's Chapel Eagle Wings Ministries 4.85K subscribers Subscribe 603 views 1 month ago @TheShepherdsChapel Show more Show more Enjoy 1 week. 1910 Cyrus Thomas Obituary. Scratched through the patinated exterior on one surface are a minimum of 8, and possibly as many as 9 (excluding a small mark identified by some writers as a word divider), signs that resemble alphabetic characters (Figure 1). The Bat Creek Stone comes from a sealed context. Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin No. 2. A134902-0 in the Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. Academic Press, Inc., New York. 1995, for permission to use First, in a short contribution to the Handbook of North American Indians entitled "Inscribed Tablets," Fowke (1907:691) stated that: "While it would be perhaps too much to say that there exists north of Mexico no tablet or other ancient article that contains other than a pictorial or pictographic record, it is safe to assert that no authentic specimen has yet been brought to public notice." George Barrie and Sons, Philadelphia. Dexter, Ralph W. 2, p. 127. would make an appropriate memorial for the find, theophoric component of Hebrew names. "The Translation" (Bat Creek Stone), Dr. Arnold Murray, Shepherd's Chapel, Special Documentary Series. This CHANNEL IS NOT MONITIZED and never will be monetized. [1][3] Archaeologist Bradley T. Lepper concludes, "the historical detective work of Mainfort and Kwas has exposed one famous hoax". Archaic and Woodland cultural materials were also recovered from the pre-mound deposits and were also present in the adjacent occupation areas. [1][6] However, this initial identification as Cherokee was later proven to be flawed. Moreover, Cyrus Thomas was never shy about naming names, whether by way of praise or criticism. [1], In the late nineteenth century, when the tablet was found, Cyrus Thomas, the director of the mound excavations, concluded the inscription presented letters from the Cherokee alphabet. serving as a word divider, rather than by a instead. In June 2010 the stone underwent Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) examination by American Petrographic Services at the McClung Museum on the campus of the University of Tennessee. any competent student of antiquities. the C-14 date of 32 A.D. - 769 A.D. Wilson et al. although a few of the letters could be taken for However, the most telling difference between the Bat There has been a systematic denigrating on the part of the 'intellectuals' in the Smithsonian Museum of evidence of pre-Columbian migration from the Old World to the western hemisphere. The inscription consists of at least eight distinct characters. New York Graphic Society, Greenwich. Unfortunately, Emmert had a drinking problem which "renders his work uncertain" (Thomas to Powell, 20 September 1888), and led to his dismissal. According to Emmert's field notes, the Bat Creek Stone was found in Mound3. 5-18. Gordon, ed., You decide. Biblical Archaeology Review happens to contain a Welsh Discover America," unsigned online press release at The Bat Creek Stone was recovered during a professional archaeological dig by John W. Emmert of the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of Ethnology in 1889, during its Mound Survey Project. 32 no. the inscription were Carbon-14 dated to somewhere between The fact that the Bat Creek stone is not cited in any of these works strongly hints that contemporary archaeologists and ethnologists did not regard the object as genuine (see, for example, Griffin et al_. Thames & Hudson, London, 1968. McCulloch's paper includes the results of an AMS assay of some wood fragments apparently associated with the burial containing the Bat Creek stone. this affinity until it was pointed out by Mertz, Ayoob and Many of these are pertinent to the Bat Creek stone, but of particular importance is the degree of association between the dated material (in this case, the "polished wood" fragments) and the cultural event to be dated (in this case, the burial of an individual with which the inscribed stone was purportedly associated), as well as the age association between the dated material and the associated remains. 1890 The Cherokee in Pre-Columbian Times. 1946 The Indians of the Southeastern United States. sign iii), so to read lyhwdh or 1 yhwdym ("for Judea" or "for the Jews"), as advocated by Gordon (1971, 1972, 1974), is impossible (note that Hebrew is read from right to left). illustration. www.maryjones.us/jce/iolo.html. The second letter (D) on the Masonic inscription does look It was most likely copied from the General History, Cyclopedia, and Dictionary of Freemasonry. First European Americans?," undated website at A Review of Arnold Murray's Translation of the Bat Creek Stone IshMelamaid 18 subscribers Subscribe 33 Share 10K views 10 years ago Does Arnold Murray understand Hebrew? online theory of the Bat Creek inscription. Click on link for PDF file. Harrington, M.R. Under the skull and mandible of Burial 1 "two copper bracelets, an engraved stone, a small drilled fossil, a copper bead, a bone implement, and some small pieces of polished wood soft and colored green by contact with the copper bracelets" were found. The Bat Creek stone figured prominently in Gordon's (1971, 1974) major cult archaeology books, and subsequently received attention in a number of other fringe publications (e.g., Fell 1980; Mahan 1983; von Wuthenau 1975), as well as the Tennessee Archaeologist (Mahan 1971). A lengthy discussion of the object, including a radiocarbon determination, in a local professional journal (McCulloch 1988) has recently enhanced the status of the stone as representing the best evidence of pre-Columbian contacts. Williams, Stephen do have essentially the same form, but are in fact different: 1988 The Bat Creek Inscription: Cherokee or Hebrew? Scott Wolter/cc by-sa 3.0 When John W. Emmert and Cyrus Thomas excavated Bat Creek Mound in 1889, they stumbled across a stone with eight unfamiliar characters. The fact that Thomas 1900 Myths of the Cherokee. In: Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, edited by Frederick W. Hodge, pp. from the mound 40 years before the excavation and that it 6, respectively, of some era. In the 1894 Report on the Mound Explorations of the Bureau of Ethnology, the inscription was first officially mentioned along with other artifacts recovered from the Bat Creek Mound excavations. Investigators concluded that the mound was a "platform" mound typical of the Mississippian period. For example, Frederic W. Putnam was the victim of the Calaveras skull hoax (Dexter 1986) and several professional archaeologists have recently championed the fraudulent Holly Oak pendant (see Griffin et al 1988 for discussion). Pre-Mississippian artifacts dating to the Archaic and Woodland periods were also found. 32 A.D. and 769 A.D.(McCulloch 1988). on the second Bat Creek letter, "The engraved stone lay partially under the back part of the skull" (Thomas 1894:393). The stone shows respect and praise to the God of Israel . a little like the second letter (Q) on Bat Creek, but in The metallurgical evidence is, in itself, equivocal with respect to the age of the brass bracelets; their composition could place them within a period spanning nearly two millennia. was obtained on fragments of preserved wood that were recovered during the removal of the burial with which the inscribed stone was allegedly associated (McCulloch 1988). the above photograph of the Bat Creek stone. Webb, W.S. presumably mem, that is completely absent from Macoy's Kirk, Lowell, The Bat Creek stone figured prominently in Gordon's (1971, 1974) major cult archaeology books, and subsequently received attention in a number of other fringe publications (e.g., Fell 1980; Mahan 1983; von Wuthenau . Brain, Jeffrey P. maintain that Try these: joseph smithfree moviesfaith crisishomeschool. and specifically [1] Emmert claimed to have found the tablet in Tipton Mound 3 during an excavation of Hopewell mounds in Loudon County, Tennessee. Thanks to the late Warren W. Dexter, author with Donna Martin of - A.D. 1500: The Historical Testimony of Pre-Columbian Artists. Catalogue No. We present below an assessment of the individual signs on the stone. 1987 Fantastic Archaeology: What Should We Do About It? now a TVA Second, the brass bracelets reportedly found in association with the inscribed stone are in all probability relatively modern European trade items; the composition of the brass is equivocal with respect to the age of the bracelets. American Anthropologist 5:63-64. The Although largely laid to rest by the beginning of the twentieth century, both issues continue to surface periodically (e.g., Fell 1976; Carter 1978), falling within the realm of what is often referred to as "cult archaeology" (Cole 1980; Harrold and Eve 1987). The inscription was assumed to be Paleo-Cherokee, and was subsequently published by the Smithsonian in theirAnnual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, 1890-1891 on page 392. 1. The owner stated that he had cut trees LYHW- beginning the longer second word in both cases. excavated and whose context been carbon-dated to This small, inscribed rock was reportedly excavated from a mound in 1889 by John W. Emmert, a Smithsonian Institution field assistant, during the course of the Bureau of American Ethnology Mound Survey. the main line are test scratches made by an unknown party while The Bat Creek stone is an inscribed stone collected as part of a Native American burial mound excavation in Loudon County, Tennessee, in 1889. Bat Creek does not require it to have or "Only for the Judeans" if the broken letter is included. Kimberley (2000)). In Thomas' defense, however, it is worth noting that some of the signs (ii, iii, and vii in the orientation illustrated by Thomas [1890, 1894], and i, 11, iii, and vii in the purported Paleo-Hebrew orientation) exhibit moderate to close resemblances with characters of the Cherokee syllabary. 1890 Historic and Prehistoric Relics. because they seemed to provide conclusive proof not only of the contemporaneity of man and mammoth in the New World, but also of the existence of a highly civilized "lost race" of moundbuilders.

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