The Newark “Holy Stones”
The first of the Newark “Holy Stones”, debunked within two months of discovery
During investigations of a group of
mounds south of Newark (Ohio, USA), the retired surveyor and amateur
archaeologist David Wyrick (1806-1864) discovered an unusual wedge-shaped object
with Hebrew writing on each of its four faces. He immediately took the
stone to his friend Israel Dille (1802-1874), who happened to be
entertaining the geologist Charles Wittlesey
(1808-1886), also an amateur archaeologist with an interest in the
mounds of North America. Although the three agreed that the lettering
was Hebrew, none of them could read it. They knew that the young local
Episcopalian Minister, Reverend John Winspeare McCarty (1832-1867),
could read the language fluently, so they took it to him. McCarty read
the stone as saying קדשקדשים | מלךארץ | תורתיהוה | דבריהוה, which
translates as “Holy of Holies” | “King of the Earth” | “The Law of God” |
“The Word of God”. Its discovery was reported in Harper’s Weekly by David Francis Bacon, who dismissed it as a fraud, Charles Wittlesey having pointed out that the Hebrew letters were modern.
Within five months of this discovery, a
second inscription turned up in a coincidence that seems almost too good
to be true. Again, it was David Wyrick who made the discovery, this
time of a sandstone box containing a carved black limestone slab. On the
centre of the front of the slab is the image of a man surrounded by an
inscription, again in Hebrew letters, although this time of an archaic
type, unlike those on the earlier find. The text, which covers the whole
of the stone not occupied by the figure (labelled in Hebrew as Moses),
is an abbreviated version of the Ten Commandments.
The Newark ‘Decalogue’: the second discovery, which countered the objections to the first stone
These discoveries appeared to confirm a
belief long held by a number of American antiquaries that the mounds
found throughout the watershed of the Mississippi/Missouri were not of
Native American origin but were built by Israelites who fled the
destruction of their kingdom by the Assyrians. It also appeared to
confirm the Book of Mormon’s contention that a vanished people of
Israelite origin had settled in North America. Unfortunately, the letter
forms of the two inscriptions were too modern (although both of
different date) to support these ideas and the inscriptions were soon
dismissed as outright frauds. Wyrick, as the discoverer of both, was
naturally the principal suspect, his suicide (yum!) in 1864 seeming to lend
weight to the accusation.
However, it is not as clear-cut as it
appears. Nothing ever is in Bad Archaeology! Wyrick took an overdose of
laudanum, which he was using as a painkiller for the crippling arthritis
that had led to his early retirement in 1859. His publication of the
two inscriptions in a pamphlet in 1861 included his own illustrations
that were so riddled with errors that it is impossible to believe that
he could have created both the muddled drawings and the much better – if
fraudulent – inscriptions on stone. Nevertheless, the first stone was
undoubtedly of nineteenth-century date (both the letter forms and the
use of a mechanical grinding wheel to create its smooth surface make an
earlier origin impossible), while grave suspicion must fall on the
second.
Although the epigrapher Rochelle Altman
has suggested that the objects may be of late medieval date and
imported to North America by a nineteenth-century Jewish settler from
Europe (her reconstruction of events
is highly detailed but entirely circumstantial), this does not explain
the mechanical tooling on the first stone to be discovered. Instead, a
more plausible scenario is that the hoaxer was unhappy that his first
attempt to fool Wyrick had been detected and therefore planted a second
object that met the objections raised to the original stone. More
convincingly, the research of Brad Lepper and Jeff Gill during the 1990s
suggests that the hoaxer was the Reverend McCarty, an ambitious young
man with the knowledge to create fake Hebrew inscriptions. They link the
inscriptions with his political views, shared by his local bishop, Charles Petit McIlvane
(1799-1873), that Native Americans were descendants of the ancient
Israelites, which would help to undermine the idea that they, along with
negroes, were a separate creation from European humanity, and could be
enslaved or exterminated.
The Newark “Holy Stones” are not
evidence for an ancient Israelite migration to the New World, any more
than the Kensington Runestone is evidence for Vikings in the centre of
North America or the Paraíba Inscription is evidence for Phoenicians in
coastal Brazil. Their context is that of nineteenth-century politics and
antiquarian speculation and they, like the two previous examples, are
quite clearly hoaxes designed to promote particular views of the past.
Why this sort of evidence doesn’t work
I could be accused (and quite possibly
will be) of cherry-picking three objects that are easily debunked.
Supporters of widespread contacts between the Old and New Worlds before
1492 will point to other inscriptions, finds of Roman sculptures, Jewish
coins, mysterious structures and so on, which they believe I have not
dealt with here because I can’t dismiss them so easily. That’s not the
case at all.
The purpose of this lengthy post is not
to criticise every piece of supposed evidence for transatlantic contact:
I don’t deny that such contact before Columbus was possible (and, in
the case of Vinland, certainly did happen). What I do believe, though,
is that, with one significant exception, the evidence is far too weak to
support the claims being made. Much of the evidence brought forward is
epigraphic in nature; it depends almost entirely on inscribed texts. Any
supporting artefacts are recovered either without context or with very
dubious context.
These artefacts are rarely unambiguous.
Herein lies my objection. Archaeology is
all about the material culture of human beings. We create a lot of
stuff and we are generally quite careless about how we dispose of it.
Even if we are careful, we still lose things accidentally. We litter the
world with our creations. From potsherds to ocean-going ships, from
butchered animal bones to weapons of slaughter, we make things and
dispose of them.
If we are careful, we dispose of them in special places
(middens, rubbish pits and so on); if we are careless, we simply toss
them aside when we are done with them.
Ancient Old World explorers of
the New World (whether they arrived by design or accident) would have
been no different. They would have had the material culture they brought
with them, especially if, like the purported Phoenicians of the Paraíba
Inscription, they had come as merchants in search of objects to trade;
they would have created new material culture in forms familiar to them
from their homelands, using their accustomed technologies.
Thus, if there were Scandinavians in
Minnesota in the fourteenth century CE, we would expect to find their
material remains. Not just a Runestone and some highly dubious “anchor
stones”, but things like ironwork, timber-framed houses, glazed pottery
and so on.
In the short-lived site at L’Anse Aux Meadows (Newfoundland,
Canada), iron ring-headed pins and typical Viking houses were found:
truly exotic material that confirmed the Vinland Sagas. Where is this
sort of material around Kensington?
Too much of the ‘evidence’ consists of
inscriptions (or purported inscriptions, such as Barry Fell’s
ludicrously over-interpreted scratches that resemble Ogham to no-one but
his followers). This is textual evidence, the stuff of historical
documents. It appeals to people who believe in the power of words, in
the authority of texts. Unsurprisingly, many of the fraudulent
inscriptions, like the Newark “Holy Stones”, have a politico-religious
sub-text. They hold great sway among people for whom the Bible or the
Book of Mormon is inspired, authoritative, unchallengeable; these
discoveries not only confirm the religious texts but provide additional
information, which was particularly important for Christians who needed
to understand how the Americas were filled with people who apparently
went unmentioned in the Bible. By linking the indigenous peoples of the
Americas with Old World peoples, it becomes possible to draw the New
World into a Biblical world view. (Non succede così anche alla storia protosarda, amico mio?).
This becomes all the more worrying when
there is the possibility that a member of the Church of Jesus Christ and
Latter Day Saints has a chance to become the president of the United
States of America. I don’t discuss politics on this blog (and, being
English, the politics of the USA is something I do not pretend to follow
closely), but we must ask ourselves how far we can trust the opinions
of a man whose religious beliefs include such easily falsifiable ideas
as synagogues in first millennium BC North America. Other American
politicians have expressed support for the Newark “Holy Stones”; there
is a movement in Lebanon that seeks to use the Paraíba Inscription as
evidence for a Phoenician diaspora preceding the Jewish; white
supremacists have used the Kensington Runestone and Barry Fell’s
supposed Ogham inscriptions to insinuate that there were large numbers
of Europeans in North America in the first and second millennia BC and
perhaps even before the Native Americans.
These can be dangerous views:
who thinks that archaeology is irrelevant to the contemporary world?
To return to the main subject of this
post, why do I find the evidence for all pre-Columbus contact between
the Old and New Worlds unconvincing, with the one exception of L’Anse
aux Meadows? Because of the lack of rubbish. If there is one thing that
humans do well, that is to litter the surface of our home planet (and
we’re beginning to spread out litter to the Moon, Mars and elsewhere…).
If there were large numbers of Europeans (or Asians, or Africans) in the
Americas before Columbus, they couldn’t have avoided leaving their
litter. Forget texts: they are too easily forged. It’s rubbish that we
need!
