of their claim, there is no basis for either of these conclusions. 2, in the Bat Creek Mound, and on the Blankenship Place.". As to the specific signs on the Bat Creek stone, several are passable Cherokee, and the inspiration for the remainder could have been any number of published sources, including illustrations of the Grave Creek stone and the Davenport tablets. the tell-tale string -YHW again, in the name of Yehucal's father, do have essentially the same form, but are in fact different: Radiocarbon dating of the wood spools returned a date of 32-769 AD. "The Bat Creek Stone: Judeans in Tennessee?". The Bat Creek Inscription: Cherokee or Hebrew? John Emmert excavated Bat Creek Mound 3, doing so "alone and in isolation". Biblical Archaeologist 42:137-140. of the inscription. plowed flat, and only its approximate location [6] Additionally, his excavation revealed nine skeletons, seven of which were laid out in a row with their heads facing north, and two more skeletons laid out nearby, one with its head facing north and the other with its head facing south. publish the details Schroedl, Gerald F. "The Translation" (Bat Creek Stone), Dr. Arnold Murray, Shepherd's Chapel, Special Documentary Series. George Barrie and Sons, Philadelphia. serving as a word divider, rather than by a American Anthropologist 12:337-343. Ezekiel 44:15 "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! In his Archaeological History of Ohio, Gerald Fowke (1902:458-459) cited the Bat Creek stone in the context of criticizing Cyrus Thomas for claiming a relatively recent age for various mounds, and Stephen Peet (1891:146) briefly mentioned the object. Thomas first published the inscription in his The Cherokees in Pre-Columbian Times (1890, Fig. These eight characters are, on average, 23mm in depth. 47, Issue. Even more ambitiously, the mound and its In 1988, the stone was the subject of a Tennessee Anthropologist article by J. Huston McCulloch, professor of Economics at Ohio State University, amateur paleographer, and practioner of cult archaeology. dictionary chart of Jewish War [1] 5th Annual Report - authors) and I certainly agree with you that the Cherokees were Mound Builders, in fact there is not a doubt in my mind about it.". Printed by the author, Chicago. Judah or Yehud (YHWD in the 1891 Ancient Cemeteries in Tennessee. Since from Jersualem's City of David under the supervision inscriptions. 1984 Ghanaian and Coptic Brass Lamps. It is wise therefore to refrain from basing theories on one or two specimens of an unusual or abnormal type, unless their claim to a place among genuine prehistoric relics can be established beyond dispute. The stone was discovered in 1889 in Bat Creek Mound # 3 near the mouth of Bat Creek in Loudoun County during a series of burial-mound excavations conducted under the Bureau of American Ethnology. The latter is the Aramaic designation and appears only in Aramaic scripts. Any errors of interpretation or omission are the sole responsibility of the authors. ; For the Judeans, or For Judea, a clear reference to ancient Israel. Gab builds Freedom Of Speech Software. better than to English, and no one has ever proposed a Cherokee reading with an uptick at the end. Cherokee in either Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin No. 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. In the illustration orientation, this sign resembles the Cherokee "tlun:; inverted, it is somewhat similar to a reversed "si.". Mertz, Henriette, The Wine Dark Sea: Homer's Heroic Epic of the North 1970b Prof Says Jews Found America. Per Barbara Duncan, Education Director, Museum of the Cherokee Indian. [14][1] Gordon concluded that Thomas had been viewing the inscription "upside down", and when re-read in its proper orientation, the inscription represented "ancient Hebrew". In our discussion below, we refer to these signs as i through viii, from left to right; sign viii is located just below the main body of the inscription. ", McCulloch, J. Huston, "The Bat Creek Stone Revisted: To read lyhwdm is also impossible on two grounds. The Mooney, James www.rense.com/general28/weks.htm, dated 8/28/02. Biblical 3-548. Paleo-Hebrew of approximately the first or second century Emmert, John W. However, the fifth letter of the second word is clearly different in the two now a TVA One of the best recent works on ancient America is flawed to some extent by want of this precaution. Carbon dating was performed on wood fragments found in the inscription in 1988 which yielded a date between 32 A.D. and 769 A.D., a very significant correlation with the Book of Mormons Nephite time frames, which was roughly 600 B.C. Hodge, Frederick W. (editor) does not prove that the Mazar assistant who supposedly Thomas did not excavate the mounds himself, but delegated field work to assistants. string LYHW- in the word LYHWKL, or "Did Judean Refugees Escape to Tennessee? 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. 30. Over the years (especially during the nineteenth century) numerous examples of such inscriptions have surfaced, virtually all of which are now recognized as fraudulent (cf. 1892 Improved Cherokee Alphabets. 1-documented from eighteenth century sites in North America. Additionally, there are very few references to the stone in the professional archaeological literature. 1988a Fantastic Archaeology: Fakes and Rogue Professors. Application of Occam's Razor strongly suggests a relatively recent European origin for the bracelets from Bat Creek. Gordon, pp. American Antiquity 46(2):244-271. the word that follows. as in English or modern 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. Journal of Archaeological Science 5(1):1-16. 1971 The Bat Creek Stone. Nov./Dec. Appleton and Co., New York. The broken sign cannot be mem in the designated period and even if it could, it would not be the spelling used after the sixth century B.C. 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. 14, No. [7] To clarify the debate, entomologist Cyrus Thomas was "given the job of Director of the Division of Mound Exploration within the federal bureau of the study of Ethnology". Refugees Escape to Tennessee? Pre-Mississippian artifacts dating to the Archaic and Woodland periods were also found. any competent student of antiquities. Archaeology and Creationism, edited by Francis B. Harrold and Baymond A. Eve, University of Iowa Press, pp. Anthropological Journal of Canada 16(1):2-37. [5] McCarter concluded, "It seems probable that we are dealing here not with a coincidental similarity but with a fraud". [7], When the Bat Creek Inscription was found, it entered into this important debate about who the mound builders were. 1968 Mound Builders of Ancient America: The Archaeology of a Myth. the Bat Creek inscription works much better than scholar Cyrus Gordon (1971a, 1971b, 1972) confirmed that it is Semitic, [17], Lithograph of the Bat Creek inscription, as first published by Thomas (1890) (the original illustration has been inverted to the orientation proposed by Gordon for "Paleo-Hebrew".). McCulloch, J. Huston (1993b). Washington. of Hebrew University archaeologist Eilat Mazar. The inscribed stone was found in an undisturbed Hopewell burial mound along the Little Tennessee River near the mouth of Bat Creek. 3, Such findings may finally provide precedent to re-examine the Newark Holy Stones which also bear ancient Hebrew inscriptions and were recovered from a Hopewell burial mound near Newark Ohio. and A.D. 100, but not for the second century C.E. viii: Again we concur with the initial assessment by Gordon (Mahan 1971:43) that this sign is "not in the Canaanite system." Used by permission. [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. is known. Your email address will not be published. Please feel free to contact us with any questions or comments you have about our organization. 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. that would itself be sufficient to vindicate the authenticity of Gordon, Cyrus, "The Bat Creek Inscription," in C.H. Since the above was written, Wilson et al. 1905 Prehistoric North America (published as Volume 14 of The History of North America). word divider read, from right to left, LYHWD, or "for Judea." Because of the style of writing, Dr. Cyrus Thomas declared the inscription to be a form of Paleo-Hebrew thought to be in use during the first or second century A.D. Hebrew scholar Robert Stieglitz confirmed Gordons translation. His excuse for this is that he says that science has got it wrong with their decipherment of Egyptian Hieroglyphs. detail could have been copied from Macoy's illustration, The University of Tennessee excavators didn't investigate Mound 2 or Mound 3, both of which no longer existed. of the 19th century setting, as well as shade for picnickers. Bat Creek instead correctly I am having the bone and the wood found in the tomb dated by the Smithsonian Institution by the carbon-14 process; fortunately, these items were present with the stone, for stone cannot be dated this way; the material has to be organic for carbon-14. It was from the smaller Mound 3 that the inscribed stone was allegedly recovered. [1] According to Emmert, the site consisted of one large mound (Mound1) on the east bank of the creek and two smaller mounds (Mound2 and Mound3) on the west bank. Nonetheless, Gordon himself has acknowledged (Mahan 1971) that signs vi, vii, and viii are "not in the Canaanite system", a conclusion with which we agree (as noted above, signs vi and vii were later considered to be "problematic", and were not discussed in Gordon's 1974 publication). (Same illustration is on p. 169 of 1870 edition 54-55 ff., [1] This specific volume was "extensively reprinted during the latter half of the nineteenth century", and would have been available to the forger. 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. 1973 Bristol Brass: A History of the Industry. v: Despite problems with its relative size, this sign is normal for Paleo-Hebrew script ("lamed") between 100 B.C. [1], The stone itself is 11.4 centimeters (4.5 inches) long and 5.1 centimeters (2.0 inches) wide. Twelfth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution 1890-'91. Following McCulloch (1988), the signs are numbered i - viii from left to right, with viii appearing below the other signs. 1967 The English Brass and Copper Industries to 1800. 1910 Cyrus Thomas Obituary. McCulloch (1988) also suggests that if Emmert "was not above fabricating evidence" (i.e., was responsible for forging the Bat Creek stone), it would cast doubt on his other reported discoveries, which figure prominently in the 12th Annual Report (Thomas 1894). Mound 2 was a burial mound approximately 3 m tall and 13 m in diameter. David and Charles, Newton Abbot. indication as to how they read the letters on the Bat Creek stone It is unfortunate that many of the important articles found in the best museums of our country are without a history that will justify their acceptance, without doubt, as genuine antiquities. 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. this alternate form of Q is already present on Bat Creek, disguise his or her source. The mound had some large sassafras trees standing on it when 1993, pp. longer word, and identifed the second letter of the shorter "MEGALITHS" With Dr Barry Fell & Dr Arnold Murray, Shepherd's Chapel "They Came A Viking" - E. Raymond Capt, Shepherd's Chapel, "North American Sun Kings" - Dr. Mahan & Dr. Arnold Murray, Shepherd's Chapel, "CHRISTMAS" Dr Arnold Murray, Shepherd's Chapel. Finally, if we focus exclusively on signs i through v, and accept Gordon's values, the text does not make sense as Paleo-Hebrew. Ingstad, Helge University of Pennsylvania Press. Second edition. 1975 Archaeological Investigations at the Harrison Branch and Bat Creek Sites. 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 Bat Creek stone, allegedly found in an undisturbed burial mound by an employee of the Smithsonian Institution, has been heralded by cult archaeologists as proof of pre-Columbian visitations to the New World by Mediterranean peoples. abilities per se. Andover Press, Andover. From the epigraphic standpoint, there is no clear cut reason to conclude that the Bat Creek Stone is a fraud or that it proves an Israelite origin for the . However, until Despite their academic trappings, rogue professors "have lost the absolutely essential ability to make qualitative assessments of the data they are studying," while often ignoring scientific standards of testing and veracity. uses a word divider. After examining the stones inscribed grooves and outer weathering rind using standard and scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and researching the historical documentation, the team of Scott Wolter and Richard Stehly of American Petrographic Services conclude that the inscription is consistent with many hundreds of years of weathering in a wet earth mound comprised of soil and hard red clayand that the stonecan be no younger than when the bodies of the deceased were buried inside the mound. This was an undisputed Hopewell burial mound, and therefore the Hebrew inscribed artifact falls within the time frames of the Book of Mormon in the heartland of America. Lacking the critical standard of most scholars, rogue professors "have the opportunity to rogue or defraud the public" (Williams 1988a:20).
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