The New Mexico Mystery Stone
Mike Smith
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Drive eighteen miles west of the central New Mexico village of Los Lunas, and you drive into a world of dirt, and rocks, and little else.
In the middle of all that dirt, however, slumps an extinct, dust-caked volcano — a mountain in ruins, weathering away beneath the sun. And on the side of that little mountain, Hidden Mountain, on a tilted column of sickly brown andesite, shines a large inscription — 216 letters, in 9 lines, from an alphabet older than any known European settlement in North America.
“Amateur archeologists, historians, and epigraphers have given it a variety of translations and interpretations,” wrote UNM Archeologist Joseph C. Winter in an unpublished 1984 paper. “[These include]: an archaic version of the Ten Commandments; a 4000-year-old message left by the Near Eastern Ancestors of the Navajos; a 2500-year-old tale carved by a Greek explorer; a treasure map made by the ancestors of the Acoma Indians; a message left by the Romans; a college prank; a Mormon inscription; a 200-year-old carving made by a Spaniard who was a secret Jew; a message left by one of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel; or perhaps even a coded message left by a Hebrew-speaking extra-terrestrial.”
Most theories of how these strange letters came to be where there are have slipped away almost immediately after being advanced, but one of the more tenacious explanations has been that the writing is a form of ancient Greek and tells the story of Zakyneros, a wandering Greek sailor circa 500 B.C.
“I have come to this place to stay,” translated amateur epigrapher Dixie L. Perkins in The Meaning of the New Mexico Mystery Stone. “The other one met with an untimely death one year ago; dishonored, insulted, and stripped of flesh; the men thought him to be an object of care, whom I looked after, considered crazed, wandering in mind, to be tossed about as if in a wind; to perish, streamed with blood.”
This translation wasn’t produced until 1979 though, and was preceded by — among other attempts — what was almost certainly a more accurate translation, made in 1949 by Harvard scholar Robert Pfeiffer. Pfeiffer, an expert in Semitic languages, concluded that the mysterious inscription was written in a form of Paleo-Hebrew and paraphrased the Ten Commandments.
“I am Yahweh thy God who brought thee out of the land,” Pfeiffer’s translation began. “There shall not be unto them other gods before Me.”
Pfeiffer’s Paleo-Hebrew translation has been accepted as generally accurate by a wide range of people — from Todd Eaton, a self-taught petroglyph enthusiast, who said the Paleo-Hebrew inscription was carved by ancient Samaritans who had been shipwrecked off the coast of Texas and then wandered up the Rio Grande and Rio Puerco Rivers; to David Allen Deal, author of Discovery of Ancient America, who said he believes the Paleo-Hebrew inscription was carved circa 107 B.C. by Hebraic mound builders that had previously settled around Ohio; to historian Ferenc Szasz, who argued convincingly in Great Mysteries of the West and elsewhere, that the carving dates to 1776, when the legendary Dominguez-Escalante Expedition passed nearby; to university archeologists who believe that yeah, it’s written in Paleo-Hebrew, but it’s still a hoax.
“There is absolutely no firm evidence that the glyph was known before the 1930s,” John C. Winter wrote, and he suggested that two nearby inscriptions reading “Hobe Eva 3-19-30 1930,” were carved by the same UNM students who he believed carved the inscription on the Mystery Stone — citing as evidence the remembrances of various former UNM professors, the availability of Semitic language Bibles and textbooks from UNM’s Zimmerman Library, and the relatively new-looking appearance of the inscription.
For as long as the truth behind this story remains uncertain, the mystery of the New Mexico Mystery Stone will leave us free to believe in whatever we like — in pre-Columbian wayfarers, in passing Greeks or Spaniards, or in epic college pranks — free to believe in whatever makes the world feel the most mysterious to us, the most complex and interconnected, or simply the most fun.
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Reader Comments (12)
http://buggs.marentes.com/blog/?p=140
I think they have closed it to the public.
There's just so much crap surrounding this story, and it's gotten so tied up with people's religious and dogmatically esoteric interests, that even if it were to be proven a hoax, not everyone would accept it. It would be worthwhile, I think, to go through every book and article written about this rock and work, point by point, to either prove or disprove what the author's say.
Jack Kutz's look at it, in "Mysteries and Miracles of New Mexico," is absolutely asinine, a case study in gullibility; and Dixie L. Perkins's book, "The Meaning of the New Mexico Mystery Stone" is, aside from being one of the worst written things I've ever read, a total mistake and a lie. As for the six or so other books....
If I leaned toward any explanation other than two kids carving it in the 1930s, I'd say Ferenc Szasz's story of it being done by a Crytpojew on the Dominguez-Escalante expedition in 1776 is one of the better ones. The fact is, all documentation of this site began in the 1930s--all the stories before that are completely unverified and perhaps unverifiable.
Sure, the pre-Columbian stuff is good as a story, but it has to hold up under scrutiny. If it doesn't, we're just deluding ourselves by clinging to it.
The primary arguments against the authenticity of the stone are A) why didn't Bandolier see it during his survey of Hidden Mountain in the 1880s? He saw everything else. B) Why was the carving never remarked upon before the 1930s? And C) What's up with the other 1930s inscription right by it?
All that and the fact that no archaeological proof supports such pre-Columbian claims. Read Joseph C. Winter's official analysis of the site; the evidence he lays out is pretty convincing.
http://cita.chattanooga.org/mtdna.html
--It doesn't seem to suggest at all that there was pre-Columbian visitation to our part of the country, merely that there is certainly more to know about the meandering route the ancestors of today's Native Americans took to get here.
If anything, the new evidence suggests that all the American tribes "originated from a common ancestral genetic stock."
Beringians, Polynesians, Solutreans, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Africans, Australian aboriginals, Trojans, Carthaginians, Romans, Arabs, Irish, Welsh, Hebrews, Germans, Poles, Japanese, Chinese, Hindus, Norsemen, Portuguese, Danes, Englishmen from Bristol, Basque, Croatians, ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_trans-oceanic_contact
http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/caribarch/columbus.htm#claim
Can he at least lay claim to "going public" about it? ;-)
Who knows, all of these tales might be true. One day, we will know.