Commentary: Suppressed Archaeology (Part Four)
The Bat Creek Stone Inscription
#1293c
Martin G. Collins
Given 31-Oct-15; 12 minutes
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transcript:
A few non-conforming forensic investigators, geologists, and archaeologists have persevered long and hard to bring an important part of early history to light, and in the process have caused angry rumblings throughout the halls of academia and science. Ancient artifacts have been and are continuing to be discovered beneath our feet that give evidence against the status quo.
One artifact found over one hundred years ago that sheds some light on pre-Columbian North American history is an ancient, inscribed stone that was found at Bat Creek, Tennessee, buried with skeletons and wooden artifacts. Bat Creek, Tennessee, is just south of Knoxville, just to give you a mental picture.
Frank Joseph, an alternative science investigator has compiled extensive evidence of pre-Columbian societies in North America in his book, The Lost Colonies of Ancient America. This is what he uncovered about the Bat Creek Stone:
In mid-February 1889, John W. Emmert was working on behalf of the Bureau of Ethnology’s Mound Survey Project for Washington, D.C.’s famed Smithsonian Institute. His assignment: Excavate an undisturbed trio of prehistoric “Indian mounds” standing along the Little Tennessee River, near the mouth of Bat Creek.
At 28 feet across and 5 feet high, Mound 3 of the earthworks yielded some wood fragments, plus skeletal remains of 9 adult males. Seven were laid out shoulder-to-shoulder in a single row, and one pair had been positioned apart, off-center of the mound, to the west. The head of the easternmost skeleton pointed south; all the rest were aligned to the north.
Emmert noticed that the skull of the lone, southward-oriented figure was resting on something slightly protruding from its jaw. Carefully lifting the cranium, he saw a rectangular stone about 4.5 inches long, 2 inches wide, and 0.39 inches think (slightly smaller than the average smartphone today).
More remarkably, the apparently shaped object had been engraved with five glyphs, forming a mysterious inscription. Emmert reported the find to his immediate superior, Cyrus Thomas, who was not only the Bureau chief but also one of the most politically-connected academics of his day. Thomas was unimpressed by Emmert’s tablet, dismissing its inscription as “Paleo-Cherokee.”
What is this “Paleo-Cherokee” language that Thomas claims this inscription is written in? This was an early-19th century attempt by Sequoyah, a Native American silversmith, to develop a Cherokee syllabary, making reading and writing in his native language possible.
This language is questionable because it signified the only instance in recorded history that a member of a non-literate people independently created an effective writing system. Sequoyah’s syllabary was adopted by the Cherokees in 1825. The Cherokee written language did not exist before 1825; nevertheless, the Bureau Chief claimed the Bat Creek inscription was “Paleo-Cherokee.”
Thomas forwarded the Bat Creek Stone to the Smithsonian Institution, where it was briefly displayed as a minor curiosity, then shelved and largely forgotten. More than 60 years later, its photograph in a turn-of-the-century history book came to the attention of Dr. Joseph P. Mahan, professor of history and chief curator at Columbus, Georgia’s Museum of Arts and Crafts. He recognized at once that the inscription on the Tennessee tablet was not “Paleo-Cherokee,” but “paleo-Hebrew.” In their ignorance of its real identity, Smithsonian officials had first displayed, then photographed and published Emmert’s discovery upside-down.
Alarmed, Dr. Mahan contacted Cyrus Gordon, professor of Ancient Languages at New York’s Brandeis University. He handily translated the Bat Creek Stone’s inscription “for Judah,” and dated it to internal linguistic evidence between 70 and 135 AD
It gets even more interesting: These time parameters coincided with the statements of Flavius Josephus, a first century Romanized Jewish historian. In his written work, The Jewish War (circa 75 AD) about the history of the destruction of Jerusalem, he told how “the Hebrews fled across the sea to a land unknown to them before.”
Here is the interesting part: The term for the “land” Josephus used was Epeiros Occidentalis, or “Western Continent,” a self-evident reference to America. This would mean that Hebrew-speaking war refugees from the ancient Old World arrived in eastern Tennessee more than 1,300 years before Christopher Columbus undertook his premier transatlantic voyage.
Following publication of Cyrus Gordon’s findings, the professor was viciously attacked by mainstream academics, who labeled him a “rogue scholar,” going so far as to cast aspersions on his sanity, even though he was internationally recognized as the world’s leading Semiticist.
When his vehement skeptics were eventually forced to concede that the Bat Creek Stone indeed inscribed paleo-Hebrew, they turned their wrath on Gordon, its defenseless discoverer. Having been dead for more than half a century, he was an easy target for orthodox archaeologists, whose careers were quite literally invested in the dominant paradigm: No Old-World Visitors to America Before 1492.
They repeatedly castigated John Emmert as a hopeless drunkard who faked the inscribed stone to win favor from his influential boss, Cyrus Thomas. Although no evidence was ever produced to suggest that Emmert was either an alcoholic or forger, for the next 40 years, his invented debauchery and chicanery became part of official positions designed to explain away the Bat Creek inscription as a manufactured hoax.
But during that time, the artifact he found was not entirely without champions. Among them was Henritte Mertz, a Chicago patent attorney admitted to practice before the United States Supreme Court and a Lieutenant Commander, USNR (Ret.) veteran of World War II, when she was the Special Assistant to the Advisor on Patent Matters, Office of Scientific Research and Development, as a cryptanalyst, breaking Axis military and diplomatic codes for the Allies. Professionally trained in forgery identification, Mertz concluded that the Bat Creek inscription was genuinely ancient.
Other supporters were Ancient American magazine reporter David Allen Deal, whose close-up inquiry into the tablet re-affirmed Cyrus Gordon’s translation. And J. Huston McCulloch, an economics professor at Ohio State University won hands down an ongoing debate with the artifact’s bitter detractors in a series of point-counterpoint articles from 1988 to 2004, published by the Tennessee Anthropologist magazine.
Not until 2010, however, was the Bat Creek Stone finally submitted to the kind of scientific testing that would either confirm its pre-Columbian provenance, or finally debunk it as a modern fraud. In charge of the process was Scott F. Wolter, a professional geologist and president of American Petrographic Services, Inc. (St. Paul, Minnesota), which is an award-winning forensic laboratory equipped with state-of-the-art research technologies. These were applied to the object at the McCurg Museum of the University of Tennessee campus (Knoxville), beginning with the Olympus SZX 12 Zoom microscope, plus a Spot digital camera system, on May 28, 2010.
Examinations continued into the summer with a scanning electron microscope. After completing analysis and organizing its data, Wolter published his conclusions in Ancient American magazine:
Our geological findings are consistent with the Smithsonian Institute’s field report written by John W. Emmert. [Remember, he was the one who discovered the stone tablet, but the inscription was shrugged off as “Paleo-Cherokee.”]
Complete lack of the orange-colored, silty-clay residue in any of the characters of the inscription is consistent with many hundreds of years of weathering in a wet earth mound comprised of soil and hard, red clay. The inscribed stone and all the other artifacts and remains found in the mound with it can be no younger than when the bodies of the deceased were buried inside the mound. Mr. Emmert’s field work and documentation appears to be more than competent by the standards of his time, and should stand on their merit.
In other words, geological evidence demonstrated that someone engraved the inscription about the same time human remains were entombed with it in the earthen burial mound, somewhat less than 2,000 years ago. This finding closely coincides with Cyrus Gordon’s linguistic dating of the artifact from 70 to 135 AD, thereby confirming the Bat Creek Stone’s ancient authenticity beyond reasonable doubt. Ancient Hebrew coins have also been found at other sites in North America, but that is something to talk about at another time.
I would just like to add one last comment, and that is that in looking this up on Wikipedia, the government-censored encyclopedia, they took the opposite approach to this whole thing and did not bother updating the entry to show the final conclusion on it. I find that very interesting. I've always thought that Wikipedia was just an unreliable source for any information that has to do with scientific or historic data.
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