The Bat Creek Stone: Cherokee or Hebrew?

The so-called Bat Creek stone or tablet, found in 1889 in an undisturbed burial mound in eastern Tennessee is ascribed to have Hebrew writing on it. This excavated tablet, found in a Cherokee burial in Loudon County, Tennessee, has been touted as evidence, and by some even “proof,” that the Cherokee had a written language and that it was based on the Hebrew tongue.

The Bat Creek inscription

The tablet tone has a peculiar two-layer composition, which has been descried as an iron-rich siltstone, encrusted on one side with as dark gray iron oxide crust. For the most part, the letters have been scratched trough the dark crust on the upper side to reveal the light matrix beneath making the letters stand out quite brightly. In a few places, however, the crust was either thicker or the engraver lost patience, and the light matrix does not show through. This tends to make positive evaluation of the makeup of some individual markings.

The curious manner of this find is shown in the fact that the Little Tennessee River enters Tennessee from the Appalachian Mountains in the south and flows northward for just over 50 miles before emptying into the Tennessee river near Lenoir City, about 22 miles southwest of Knoxville. The completion of Tellio Dam just south of Lenoir City, at the mouth of the Little Tennessee River in 1979 created a reservoir that spans the lower 33 miles south of the river. Bat Creek, 22 miles south of Lenoir City, empties into the southwest bank of the Little Tennessee 12 miles upstream from the mouth of the river. While much of the original confluence of Bat Creek, and the Little Tennessee was submerged by the lake, the mound radio-carbon dated to 1355 AD, in which the Bat Creek Stone was found, was located above the reservoir's operating levels.
    It should be noted before progressing further that Sequoyah, was a Native American polymath of the Cherokee Nation. In 1821 he completed his independent creation of a Cherokee syllabary, making reading and writing in Cherokee possible—once again in the early 19th century!
    The Bat Creek stone became the subject of contention in 1970 when Cyrus H. Gordon, American scholar of the Semitic language, cultures and histories as well as ancient Near East languages, though claiming any no particular claim to expertise in Cherokee, proposed that the letters of the inscription were Paleo-Hebrew (member of the Canaanite family of alphabets) of the 1st or 2nd century AD rather than Cherokee, and therefore evidence of pre-Columbian transatlantic contact (Cyrus H. Gordon, Before Columbus: Links Between the Old World and Ancient America, Crown Publishers, New York, 1971).
    Archaeologist M. B. McKusick of Yale University countered that "Despite some difficulties, Cherokee script is a closer match to that on the tablet than the late-Canaanite proposed by Gordon (Marshall B. McKusick, "Canaanites in America: A New Scripture in Stone?" Biblical Archaeologist, Summer 1979, p­­­139).

Top: Paleo-Hebrew; Bottom: Cherokee; there is little to recommend any similarity

In a 1988 article in Tennessee Anthropologist, economist J. Huston McCulloch compared the letters of the inscription to both Paleo-Hebrew and Cherokee and concluded that the fit as Paleo-Hebrew was substantially better than Cherokee. He also reported a  radiocarbon date on associated wood fragments consistent with Gordon's dating of the script (J. Huston McCulloch, “The Bat Creek Stone: A Reply to Mainfort and Kwas,” Tennessee Anthropologist, vol.18, Spring 1993, pp1-26.
In a 1991 reply, archaeologists Robert Mainfort and Mary Kwas, relying on a communication from Semitist Frank Moore Cross, concluded that the inscription is not genuine paleo-Hebrew but rather a 19th-century forgery, with John W. Emmert, the Smithsonian agent who performed the excavation, the responsible party. In a 1993 article in Biblical Archaeology Review,  Semitist P. Kyle McCarter Jr. stated that although the inscription "is not an authentic paleo-Hebrew inscription," it "clearly imitates one in certain features," and does contain "an intelligible sequence of five letters—too much for coincidence." McCarter concluded, "It seems probable that we are dealing here not with a coincidental similarity but with a fraud” (P. Kyle McCarter, Jr., "Let's be Serious About the Bat Creek Stone," Biblical Archaeology Review. Vol.19, July/Aug. 1993, pp54-55, 83).

Mainfort and Kwas published a further article in American Antiquiry in 2004, reporting their discovery of an illustration in an 1870 Masonic reference book giving an artist's impression of how the Biblical phrase "holy to Yahweh” would have appeared in Paleo-Hebrew, which bears striking similarities to the Bat Creek inscription.
    The General History correctly translates the inscription "Holiness to the Lord," though "Holy to Yahweh" would be more precise. They conclude that Emmert most likely copied the inscription from the Masonic illustration, in order to please Thomas with an artifact that he would mistake for Cherokee (Robert C. Mainfort and Mary L. Kwas, "The Bat Creek Stone Revisited: A Fraud Exposed," American Antiquity, vol.64, Oct. 2004), pp761-769).
    At this point it should be noted that Hoax expert Kenneth Feder says the peer reviewed work of Mary L. Kwas and Robert Mainfort has "demolished" any claims of the stone's authenticity (Kenneth L. Feder, Encyclopedia of Nubious Archaeology; From Atlantis to the Walam Olum, ABC-CLIO, October/November 2010, pp39-40). In addition, Mainfort and Kwas themselves state "The Bat Creek stone is a fraud” (Robert C. Mainfort, Jr.. and Mary L. Kwas, “The Bat Creek Fraud: A Final Statement,” Tennessee Anthropologist, vol.18, Fall 1993), pp87-93).
    There can be no question that the linguistic evidence of the place names by sixteenth century Spanish explorers indicates that the Cherokee syllabary was a relatively late-comer to the Lower Little Tennessee Valley. A Cherokee inscription in a mound burial there would therefore still present chronological problems given the 1355 AD upper limit on burial mound building in the region (J. Huston McCulloch, “The Bat Creek Inscription: Cherokee or Hebrew?” Journal of the Tennessee Anthropological Association, vol.12 no.2, Fall 1988, p81).

Anthropologists have recorded Native American art in Tennessee caves; top: Rock Art found in the dark zones of some Tennessee caves is among the continent’s earliest art; bottom: North America’s oldest cave and Rock Art discovered in Tennessee

Another point to make about findings in Tennessee is the fact that according to the study published in Antiquity, “systematic field exploration in Tennessee has located a wealth of new rock art—some deep in caves, some in the open air. The authors show that these have a different repertoire and use of color, and a different distribution in the landscape—the open sites up high and the caves down low. These caves and landscape have been reorganized on cosmological terms by the pre-Columbian societies, and is considered to easily be the oldest discovered yet within the United States.
    Consider for a moment that if the oldest imagery in Tennessee is writing on the rock walls of caves, how does this equate to Lehi and his people,  with a highly developed written language and one thousand years of history when they arrived in the Land of Promise, that this rock art and simplified alphabet claimed to be Hebrew, would be completely out of place and not relate to Lehi and his descendants.