In 1885, a Smithsonian archaeologist by the name of Cyrus Thomas excavated an Indian burial mound located at the junction of Bat Creek and the Little Tennessee River in Loudon County, Tennessee. Among the finds was a stone inscribed with characters which Thomas reported were \u201cbeyond question letters of the Cherokee alphabet\u201d.<\/p>\n
The stone received little attention until Dr. Joseph Mahan, Jr., American Indian archaeologist and ethnologist, recently encountered it during a literature search for evidence of early contact between American Indian and eastern Mediterranean cultures. Dr. Mahan brought the stone to Dr. Cyrus Gordon, Chairman of the Department of Mediterranean Studies at Brandeis University, an expert in ancient Mediterranean languages and history.<\/p>\n
The mysterious Bat Creek Stone. Hebrew writing or Indian doodlings?<\/b><\/p>\n
Dr. Gordon concluded that the stone was not inscribed with Cherokee writing, but instead with ancient Hebrew. Based on the evidence of the inscription, he suggests that the stone is nearly 2, 000 years old and attests to pre-Columbian contacts with the New World. He stated that it is \u201cevidence of a migration of Jews from the Near East, probably to escape the long hand of Rome after the disastrous Jewish defeats in 70 and 135 A.D.\u201d The text includes five consecutive Hebrew letters which, Dr. Gordon says, mean \u201cfor (the land of) Judah\u201d. The fourth letter, a waw,<\/i> was inscribed in a style found on Hebrew coins of the Greco-Roman period during which the Jews rebelled against Rome in 66\u201370 A.D. and 132\u2013135 A.D. \u201cThe sole letter on the bottom line is an aleph,<\/i> the first letter of the alphabet which is used to designate the first year of a reign or era. There is good reason for believing that the text as a whole designates \u2018the Golden Age of the Jews: year 1\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n
BSP<\/i> 1:1 (Winter 1972) p. 27<\/p>\n
The Smithsonian Institution does not necessarily agree with Dr. Gordon\u2019s analysis. They say \u201cCurrent research by Smithsonian Anthropologists neither confirms nor denies Thomas\u2019 identification. A more recent Semitic interpretation of the inscription has not been verified by Smithsonian Scientists.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dr. Gus van Beek, Curator of Near Eastern Archaeology at the Smithsonian says that although most of the letters are clearly Hebrew, others are equivocal. He also said, \u201cthe tablet has additional scratches on it received since [its picture was] first published. These may indicate that it was not cut in ancient times because both the letters and the scratches have the same patina [surface film]. The stone might go back to Roman times, but it might also be as late as the 19th century, inscribed by someone who copied down Jewish letters of the Roman period.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dr. Gordon agrees that two of the inscription\u2019s letters – the two that precede \u2018for Judah\u2019 – are \u201cstill open to discussion\u201d, but adds that \u201cthe sequence of five authentic ancient Hebrew letters constituting an intelligible and idiomatic expression is not likely to be questioned, nor can it be attributed to accident or forgery.\u201d Finding such an inscription in an unrifled tomb in the 1880\u2019s would strongly indicate that \u201cintact burial antedates the 19th dentury\u201d. (The authenticity of the mound is supported by the fact that roots of a dead tree had grown down through it.) If the inscription is modern, he suggests, \u201can Indian had made for himself an inscription reading \u2018for Judah\u2019 in a script which had not yet been deciphered. Wilhelm Gesinuis did not decipher old Hebrew writing until the 19th century.\u201d<\/p>\n
Recently, tests were performed at the Smithsonian on brass bracelets found in the same grave. These tests, the Institute reports, \u201cdefinitely establish that they are 18th-19th century trade goods and do not have the chemical composition of brass of the Roman or early Semitic periods.\u201d<\/p>\n
Is the Bat Creek stone an ancient Hebrew inscription considered sacred by the Indians and handed down from generation to generation, or is it merely the product of Indian \u201cdoodlings\u201d in recent times? We may never know the answer.<\/p>\n
(Bureau of American Ethnology Twelfth Annual Report, 1890\u201391,<\/i> 1894; The Sciences,<\/i> Vol. II, No. 5, May 1971; correspondence from the Smithsonian Institution.)<\/p>\n
Bible and Spade 1:2 (Spring 1972)<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In 1885, a Smithsonian archaeologist by the name of Cyrus Thomas excavated an Indian burial mound located at the junction of Bat Creek and the Little Tennessee River in Loudon County, Tennessee. Among the finds was a stone inscribed with characters which Thomas reported were \u201cbeyond question letters of the Cherokee alphabet\u201d. The stone received … Continue reading “THE
\nMYSTERY OF THE BAT CREEK STONE”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sermons"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14798"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14798\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}