Bat Creek Inscription - Analysis and Debate

Analysis and Debate

Cyrus Thomas of the Smithsonian Institution initially cataloged the Bat Creek Stone inscription as a Cherokee inscription. Since the Cherokee scholar Sequoyah did not invent the Cherokee syllabary until around 1820, a Cherokee inscription could not have been made before this period. The report showed the stone turned so that the detached 8th character was above the main inscription.

The Bat Creek Stone received scant attention (even in Thomas' later publications) until the 1960s when ethnologist Joseph Mahan, puzzled by Thomas' conclusion that the inscription was Cherokee, sent a photograph of the inscription to Cyrus H. Gordon— a professor of Mediterranean Studies at Brandeis University and a well-known proponent of Pre-Columbian transatlantic contact theories. Gordon published a series of articles in the early 1970s arguing that the first five characters and the last character in the inscription — when turned so that the detached 8th character is below the main inscription — are actually a version of Paleo-Hebrew text used in the 1st century BC and the 1st century AD. Gordon suggested that the characters spelled out "for the Jews" or "for Judaea." His findings were published in Newsweek and in newspapers across the nation, sparking a renewed interest in the inscription.

In 1979, University of Iowa archaeologist Marshall McKusick rejected Gordon's interpretation of the inscription as Paleo-Hebrew. McKusick argued that the inscription actually bore similarities to an early version of Sequoyah's alphabet that was occasionally used before the standard, or "Worcester" version of the alphabet was published in 1827. Like Thomas, however, McKusick made no attempt to interpret the inscription.

The debate was revived in 1988 by J. Huston McCulloch, an economics professor at Ohio State University, who has written several articles in the Tennessee Anthropologist and Biblical Archaeology Review supporting Gordon's interpretation of the Bat Creek inscription as Paleo-Hebrew, suggesting that the brass bracelets found along with the stone had the same ratio of lead to zinc as bracelets manufactured throughout the Roman Empire in the 1st century AD, and that these factors along with radiocarbon dating support a pre-Columbian Middle-Eastern origin. However, these conclusions have been dismissed by archaeologists and linguists. Paleo-Hebrew expert Frank Moore Cross of Harvard University and P. Kyle McCarter, Jr., a professor of Near Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins University, have both rejected that the inscriptions are paleo-Hebrew, the latter stating that the characters "do not correspond to their proposed paleo-Hebrew prototypes closely enough to be considered authentic". Archaeologists Robert Mainfort and Mary Kwas stated that such assertions were the work of "cult archaeologists" and dismiss the metallurgic and radiocarbon analyses of conclusions of Gordon and McCulloch as flawed.