World's oldest surviving inscription of the Ten Commandments? Not quite.
February 1, 2016 12:14 PM   Subscribe

... conventional history teaches that the Americas were discovered by the Europeans either in 1492 by Columbus, or maybe a few hundred years earlier by the Vikings. There still seems to be an aversion among the establishment historians to even consider the idea that ancient Mediterranean peoples from the Middle East might have traveled to the Americas in the centuries before Christ. Only so-called diffusionists would have accepted a different view. And yet, there it is, this inscription in New Mexico, an undeniable witness from an ancient past telling its history ...
Behold, The Los Lunas Decalogue, a fascinating "old" site south of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

While there are some that believe this stone was carved by ancient Israelites who explored and settled in the New World in the centuries before the Common Era, possibly even dating back to the reign of King Solomon (circa 970 to 931 BC), and others saw resemblances in the characters to those on the Tel Dan Stele that has been dated from 870–750 BC, if viewed dispassionately, the Los Lunas inscription is a clear, but well constructed forgery (for its day).

What day might that be? Bad Archaeology draws a parallel to the Bat Creek Stone, which they consider to be a Mormon forgery (the Stone is seen by some as evidence for the Mormon version of North American pre-history, but more recent research points to John Emmert, the excavator of the Bat Creek mound, as the creator of that hoax, citing in part an illustration found in the General History, Cyclopedia and Dictionary of Freemasonry from 1870 [Archive.org]).

Or was it the two centuries old hoax of a Spanish Priest? A converso Crypto-Jew who settled in the area during the colonial period? Unfortunately, the records of this site fall under scrutiny from the beginning, as the original report on the rock comes from Frank Hibben, an anthropology scholar with the University of New Mexico who would later be nicknamed "fibben Hibben" for "it would be kind to say -- stretching things." An extensive review of the inscriptions and rather brief review of the preliminary creation of the writing surface (PDF) concluded that Hibben could have done this himself, or at least it is likely that the inscriptions could be dated closely to Hibben's public announcement of the discovery in 1936.

If this still intrigues you, you can visit this and "at least 30 ruins atop Hidden Mountain" by making a 4 mile trek (and bypassing a fence, possibly onto State land) by heading south from NM-6.
posted by filthy light thief (22 comments total) 24 users marked this as a favorite
 
Oh man. I took an Anthro 101 at UNM in the 90's. When people brought this up, the prof would slump his shoulders and sort of just mutter.
posted by lumpenprole at 12:24 PM on February 1, 2016 [13 favorites]


Hah! That's fantastic - did anyone bring up Sandia Man, or was that fully debunked to the point of being a non-reference?
posted by filthy light thief at 12:31 PM on February 1, 2016


I think it's plausible, I mean, Phoenician sailors could have reached New Mexico via the Panama Canal
posted by prize bull octorok at 12:34 PM on February 1, 2016 [34 favorites]


The latest on Cherokee DNA
posted by Oyéah at 12:59 PM on February 1, 2016 [1 favorite]


Oh man. I took an Anthro 101 at UNM in the 90's. When people brought this up, the prof would slump his shoulders and sort of just mutter.

I took a few undergrad history 100's and 200's from a famously tenured and entertaining professor at my university. He would ramble on and on about these sorts of dubiously researched hypotheticals, often chaining several of them together into greater structural, alternate histories. Whether or not he was doing a great job of teaching us history as commonly accepted, or factually supported, he gave some of us a real passion for digging into the material ourselves.
posted by stinkfoot at 1:01 PM on February 1, 2016 [1 favorite]


The latest on Cherokee DNA

That reads a lot like speculation rather than research. Is there anything peer-reviewed that suggests that any European DNA entered by sea at these late dates, rather than by land via a more conventional migration narrative at an earlier point?
posted by howfar at 1:23 PM on February 1, 2016 [1 favorite]


And then there are CHINESE who got here some 40 years before Columbus.
posted by Postroad at 2:23 PM on February 1, 2016


I know nothing about the Los Lunas Decalogue Stone and don't have any opinions about its authenticity or significance aside from skepticism which is habitual and not specific to this case.

But I will note that I can remember a time when pre-Columbian visitors from Europe to the New World were generally dismissed as unsubstantiated legends -- and yet I've stood among the remains of a Viking settlement at the UNESCO World Heritage site at L'Anse aux Meadows near the northern tip of Newfoundland.

History is a lot more complicated, and more interesting, than the condensed version that's accepted as general knowledge and there are many strange things in this world. We are very far from knowing everything about the past.

Nevertheless I'll remain skeptical for now.. But thanks, OP for introducing me to an interesting mystery -- whether it turns out to be real or fake.
posted by Nerd of the North at 2:45 PM on February 1, 2016 [5 favorites]


Spoiler alert: it's fake.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 3:08 PM on February 1, 2016 [3 favorites]


The PDF linked above is pretty conclusive IMO.

There are characteristic errors made by people unfamiliar with Hebrew, such as confusing different letters with similar sounds (kaf/kuf) and adding unnecessary matres lectionis. The nature of Hebrew makes it very, very unlikely that a native speaker would make those errors, even if they were bad at spelling. Furthermore, the transcription jumps between lines as if the scribe was copying from a document they couldn't read and lost their place.

I concur with the hypothesis reached by the authors of the PDF: the scribe was working from a transliterated Hebrew-English text that was back-transliterated into a mixture of archaic Hebrew and Greek forms; the back-transliteration was made by someone who didn't know Hebrew and the scribe didn't know Hebrew either. It's a fakedy-fakedy-fake-fake with fake cherries and fakery on top.
posted by Joe in Australia at 3:08 PM on February 1, 2016 [10 favorites]


For a few years my father was in love with the book "America BC" by Barry Fell. Then he read some other books and was embarrassed.
posted by acrasis at 4:05 PM on February 1, 2016


Is there anything peer-reviewed that suggests that any European DNA entered by sea at these late dates

No. The hypothesis of early European contact with the Americas, such that widespread genetic evidence was left behind, hinges on haplogroup X. The problem is that more detailed and careful genetic research found that the particular subgroup of X that exists in Americas (X2a) is distinct from Afro-Eurasian subgroups.

So there really isn't evidence of early admixture between some mysterious group of Paleo-Europeans crossing the Atlantic to get down and freaky with Paleo-Americans. Instead, the evidence points to different, non-admixed, populations with the American groups' genetic distinctiveness coming from the result of the Beringia bottleneck leading to a founder effect. Shockingly, this latter conclusion fits with all known genetic, archaeological, and anthropological evidence.
posted by Panjandrum at 4:07 PM on February 1, 2016 [4 favorites]


Couldn't this be from when Jesus Christ appeared to the Nephites and the Lamanites to teach them about the Ten Commandments?
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 4:08 PM on February 1, 2016 [2 favorites]


Um, duh.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 8:51 PM on February 1, 2016 [1 favorite]


Something, (information junkieism,) caused me to look up the California Native American tribes, and one by one search out their standard greeting. In many cases it was ni ha. It was the standard Chinese greeting.
posted by Oyéah at 9:34 PM on February 1, 2016


And then there are CHINESE who got here some 40 years before Columbus.

Zheng He always makes me think of Deepness in the Sky, and the voyage Pham undertakes with his own treasure fleet. What a beautiful book.
posted by grobstein at 12:26 AM on February 2, 2016 [1 favorite]


Something, (information junkieism,) caused me to look up the California Native American tribes, and one by one search out their standard greeting. In many cases it was ni ha. It was the standard Chinese greeting.

You've done it, something historians, anthropologists, and even linguists have failed to do! You've proven that Native Americans are just Chinese people in disguise!

Ugh. Double ugh.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 12:37 AM on February 2, 2016 [2 favorites]


dam gurrl!
posted by grobstein at 1:27 AM on February 2, 2016


This hemisphere has always been a melting pot.
posted by Oyéah at 2:00 AM on February 2, 2016


Yael, our sabra tour guide in Israel spent a summer with the Mormons (80s exchange program) a couple of decades ago, and still, STILL talks with a certain amount of incredulity when she relates the belief the Jesus, a first century Jew, spent time in the US during the narrative break between the dedication in the temple and the wedding at Cana. The Ten Commandments you say? Not going there with her unless & until there is much more global verification
posted by childofTethys at 4:01 AM on February 2, 2016


The misspelling of the 10 Commandment on the inscription turns it into "thou shalt not inflict upon they neighbor a testimony of liquor."

So all those students in ABQ and Las Cruces are now on notice that they are not to bore their peers with "dude, I was so drunk this weekend."
posted by ocschwar at 5:06 AM on February 2, 2016 [5 favorites]


Someone besides Utah State better get back out to Buckskin Wash on the San Rafael Swell and re-prove the pictographs are around 8000 years old, and the Fremont Indian sites. Because a professor at Utah State has just put all those images in the, Jesus Walked the Americas, time frame. Officially making the images 2000 years old, rather than 8000, props up LDS spiritual belief, and at the same time, lessens the world history value. Utahans love to profit from selling what is sacred to Native Americans, and prophet from the imagery. Rep. Rob Bishop disparages the importance of sacred sites, as often as he speaks of them.

Ten Commandments, wishful forgery.
posted by Oyéah at 11:00 AM on February 3, 2016


« Older Because Everyone Loves A Good Owl   |   It'll get there eventually Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments