From: hmccullo@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu (Huston McCulloch)
Subject: Re: Pre-Columbian Jews?
Summary: Bitmap of Bat Creek Inscription
Keywords: Bat Creek Stone, Cyrus Gordon
Organization: The Ohio State University
Date: Mon, 27 Jul 1992 15:46:29 GMT

In article <srutt.711774567@beagle> srutt@boulder.Colorado.EDU (DNA Kaifeng),
Steve quotes my posting of July 21:
>
>>However, even if there had been no inscription, the Bat Creek burial
>>turns out to contain positive proof of some kind of an Old World contact
>                      ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>>with the New World.  A pair of bracelets, originally identified by Cyrus
>>Thomas as (native) copper, were found under the same skull as the
>>engraved stone and carbon dated wood fragments.  In 1970, the bracelets
>>were analyzed and found in fact to be heavily leaded yellow brass, viz.
>>copper alloyed with approximately 27% zinc and 3.3% lead.  Brass existed
>>in the Old World since 45 B.C., but (unlike native copper), was unknown
>>in the New World prior to Columbus.  (See my 1988 *Tennessee
>>Anthropologist* article.)  The bracelets, together with the carbon date
>>(32 AD - 769 AD) are therefore proof of a pre-Viking, not to mention
>                                ^^^^^
>>pre-Columbian contact, even without the inscribed tablet.  The
>>inscription itself is our only clue as to what type of a contact this
>>was, however.
                          * * * 
>
>>We thus know the approximate date of the inscription, that it could be
>>Old World, and that it is as solid "scientific evidence" as McKusick
>                              ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>>could ask for.  What is it, then, if not Paleo-Hebrew?  Note that if
>>Gordon had never identified the script as Hebrew, the bracelets would
>>have remained "copper" to this day, and the wood fragments would never
>>have been carbon dated.

Steve objects:

>I would hate to be put on trial for murder with you as judge and jury!
>What you consider "positive proof", in the world of the harder sciences
>might at best be considered a weak hypothesis.
>
>What about skeletal data? I'm not a physical anthropologist,
>but wouldn't it be possible to distinguish an American aboriginal/Asian
>skull from a European/African skull? What about DNA fragments? If the
>DNA is not completely deteriorated I could relatively easily classify
>its owners in one of these two or three groups. Has this avenue been
>pursued? I'm not suggesting that these tests would yield "positive proof",
>but it'd be a whole lot more positive than what you've got.

     Ok, you're right.  The burial, abstracting from the inscription, is merely
positive proof of *either* a pre-Viking Old world contact *or* independent
invention in the New World of brass technology.

     Brass is very hard to make, since at atmospheric pressure, zinc boils at a
lower temperature than copper melts.  They therefore cannot simply be put
together in a crucible and mixed together to make brass.  It was not until the
cementation process was discovered circa 45 B.C. that brass began to be mass
produced in the Old World.  Zinc itself smelts into vapor and must be distilled
to obtain the solid metal.  See Paul Craddock's articles in the *J. of
Archaeological Science* 4 (1977): 103-23, and 5 (1978): 1-16.

     Given the archaeological doctrine that there was no production of brass in
the New World prior to Columbus, the bracelets demonstrate an Old World 
contact.  However, given the equally firm doctrine that there were no Old World 
contacts prior to a few Vikings on the tip of Newfoundland, they demonstrate 
independent invention of the cementation process in the New World.  So it could 
go either way.  You're acquitted.  

     This still leaves the inscription, however.  It's obviously some kind of 
writing, and even Mainfort and Kwas (Tenn. Anthropologist 1991) agree with me 
that the inscription is *not* Cherokee, contrary to Doug Jones' neighbor, 
Marshall McKusick (*The Davenport Conspiracy Revisited*, 1991, p. 156.)

     Alan Lustiger (lustiger@att.com) has suggested that I post a bitmap of the
inscription, which I have appended to the end of this note.  For purposes of 
discussion, I have identified the letters, as in my 1988 Tenn. Anthropologist 
article, as i through viii.  So as not to prejudge that this is a Semitic 
inscription, I have done this from left to right.  

     Letter iv is a strikingly distinctive specimen of Paleo-Hebrew yod, as it
appears on coins of the Jewish War.  Assuming this is PH, v and iii, though not 
terribly distinctive, are equally clearly lamed and he, respectively.  The 
comma-like symbol between v and vi is then a PH-type word divider, such as 
appears, for example, in photographs (though not always in transcriptions) of 
the Siloam inscription, or in the Qumran Leviticus fragments (Birnbaum, *The 
Hebrew Scripts*, Part Two, Plates, 1954, plates 28-30).  The main line 
therefore has two words.  Still assuming this is PH, ii and i are then waw and 
daleth, respectively, so that v - i reads lyhwd, "for Yehud (Judea)", according 
to Cyrus Gordon (*Before Columbus*, 1971).  The fact that 5 of 8 letters work 
legibly as PH, and make a word, convinces me, at least, that this really is PH. 
I am very curious to know what readers of this bulletin board think.

     Letters v through viii are harder to interpret.  As PH, vi's best match is 
qoph, and vii is simply a backwards resh.  Making resh backwards, so as to look 
just like a Greek rho, could perhaps be due to a Hellentistic influence; the 
Masada ostraca bear proper names spelled in Aramaic-derived Square Hebrew
letters, along with individual letters in both PH and Greek, indicating that
Jewish War era warriors were familiar with both PH and Greek letters.  (Yadin,
*Masada*, 1966, p. 190.)  The trouble with this is that while Resh-Qoph is a 
Hebrew word, I am advised by Gordon that this would not make a whole lot of 
sense, followed by lyhwd.  Letter viii is likewise difficult to interpret.  It
could be aleph, a defective samekh, or even another form of waw.  Gordon 
suggests it could indicate a year of some era.  The leadership of the 
individual with whom it was buried?  The Jewish War?

     The following bitmap is in BMP format, which is legible by Windows 
Paintbrush.  In order to make it transmittable without unpredictable 
complications, it has been encoded using the Unix uuencode command.  In order 
to use it, the reader will first have to decode it using the Unix uudecode 
command.  For example, if the encoded version is assigned the name "code", and 
the user wishes to assign the DOS-usable name "batmap.bmp" to the decoded 
version, the user should execute the Unix command
               uudecode <code >batmap.bmp
The decoded version can then be passed to DOS, brought up on the screen under 
Windows Paintbrush, and printed out by Paintbrush.  200% in landscape mode 
nicely fills a page.  The actual length of the stone is about 4.5 inches (11 
cm).

     According to the documentation, uudecode will strip away any preceding or
following text, so this entire message can be uudecoded without editing.  I
tested this, and it seems to work.

     Alan Lustiger (lustiger@att.com) has offered to make a GIF-encoded version
available for non-Windows users.  My own attempts to convert it to GIF have
been unsuccessful, so I refer interested parties to him.

     What follows will appear as several pages of gobbledygook.  No text
follows.

uuencoded bitmap (BMP) of Bat Creek Inscription:

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end


   Squre ska   could (The same letter,  convince me, at
Baumn, Soloaon the Siloam inscripion ton vo
the coins of the Jewish War.  i
 agree ola Olum
    a lower temy hard to