Bat Creek Stone
Facribared inscribed stone tablet / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The Bat Creek inscription is an inscribed stone tablet found by John W. Emmert on February 14, 1889.[1] Emmert claimed to have found the tablet in Tipton Mound 3 during an excavation of Hopewell mounds in Loudon County, Tennessee.[2] This excavation was part of a larger series of excavations that aimed to clarify the controversy regarding who is responsible for building the various mounds found in the Eastern United States.[1]
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In the late nineteenth century, when the tablet was found, Cyrus Thomas, the director of the mound excavations, concluded the inscription presented letters from the Cherokee alphabet.[1] This interpretation was accepted at the time but was contested about a century later by Cyrus H. Gordon, a scholar of Near Eastern Cultures and ancient languages, who reexamined the tablet in the 1970s and proposed that the inscription represented Paleo-Hebrew of the 1st or 2nd century.[1] The consensus among archaeologists is that the tablet is a hoax,[1][3] although some have argued that the ancient Hebrew text on the stone supports pre-Columbian transoceanic contact theories.[4] Countering the notion of pre-Columbian transoceanic contact theories, archaeologists Robert Mainfort and Mary Kwas have concluded that the inscription is not a genuine paleo-Hebrew artifact but rather a 19th-century forgery.[1][3] Furthermore, the conclusions drawn by Mainfort and Kwas have been accepted by other archaeologists and members of academic communities.[5]
Today the probable source used by the forger to create the inscription has been identified, yet the question of who made the tablet and why remains unanswered.[1]