Talk:Bat Creek Stone

message: Can someone insert this image taken from the Masonic encyclopedia? Nice reference
http://imgur.com/a/LO101  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Hippypink (talk • contribs) 08:42, 4 October 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Photo from Masonic text 

message: :It's funny that the same "experts" who argue so vehemently that the inscription isn't Hebrew also argue that it is a forgery by a member of the Smithsonian team who wanted noteriety.  How bright can the detractors be if they don't recognize those positions are mutually exclusive?  On the one hand, you'd have to be an idiot to think it's Hebrew -- then at the same time, it is Hebrew, but it's a forgery.
: I have copies of some of the articles, and will try to add footnotes (if I have not thrown the articles away) in the next few months. For the record, I am not Mormon (meaning I did not initiate this article to further a religious agenda) nor am I convinced that this is a first century trans-oceanic voyage.  However, I am originally from Tennessee and view this as a fascinating bit of U.S. history that is worth an article.  --Baxterguy (talk) 17:27, 6 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Incidentally, if Mormons have a special interest in this artifact, then the article should state so.  Can someone add this?  Tempshill (talk) 17:34, 28 October 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Comments

message: What does this article have to do with Geology?  Bms4880 (talk) 20:44, 18 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I guess it must of snuck in there by being part of Category:Stones, maybe that's been done automatically? I have to say that I don't think it should be included, as the rock type doesn't even get a mention. Mikenorton (talk) 20:54, 18 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: There we go, I removed the banner. Also removed the Stones category and the Ancient Roman Jewish History categories from the article.Doug Weller (talk) 21:27, 18 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Geology 

message: I put a photo request tag on this article - the current image appears to be a drawing (or a rubbing?) from a late-1800s book.  Since the artifact is currently at the Frank H. McClung Museum, it'd be great if someone could take a good photo of it for this article.  Tempshill (talk) 17:37, 28 October 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Photo request 

message: Just though I'd summarise the findings to date:
# It's real (that is, that the inscription was made before it was buried).
# No one can figure out what the characters mean.
## It can't be Cherokee.
## It probably isn't Hebrew (proto or otherwise).
## A third language has yet to be suggested.
--Auric (talk) 22:26, 25 June 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: They've shown conclusively that it wasn't a hoax??  Bms4880 (talk) 13:14, 26 June 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: They've shown that the inscription predates its discovery by John W. Emmert. In my mind that rules out a hoax.--Auric (talk) 20:38, 26 June 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: This debate is really more suitable for a web forum. Our opinions as to whether it's a hoax or not shouldn't affect the article. Dougweller (talk) 20:42, 26 June 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: This is not a debate. Also this is not my opinion. I was simply summarizing, which I cannot do in the article, for the benefit of people who are confused about the science. Please feel free to suggest a proper forum.--Auric (talk) 13:10, 27 June 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Keep in mind Wolter's findings (as with his Kensington findings) are controversial, and should be considered evidence, not a "last word" on the subject.  We need to wait for the response from U.T. archaeologists before ruling out a hoax.  Bms4880 (talk) 13:26, 27 June 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: And until the mainstream view changes, it's still considered a hoax. I was on a break when Wolter was added to this article and if it belongs here at all, it shouldn't be laid out like that and needs to be balanced by possibly something from . Wolter is a fringe writer and his opinions shouldn't be given as much weight as those of actual archaeologists. Dougweller (talk) 14:44, 27 June 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: And this . Dougweller (talk) 14:48, 27 June 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Summary 

message: The citations in this article are a mess, since it is not specified which of several articles by same authors is intended.  I suggest we gravitate to "short citations", i.e. author (year, page) in footnotes or inline, with a complete list of references, if no one objects.  The implicit "ibid" format now used is strongly discouraged in WP:Citing sources.  (WP:IBID at present does not go to correct paragraph in the Citing sources article.)  HuMcCulloch (talk) 16:02, 4 February 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: How about parenthetical referencing? see WP:HARV - I think that is much better as it is clear what/who is being used. Dougweller (talk) 17:29, 4 February 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Agreed, though it will take some time to figure out which reference is which.  HuMcCulloch (talk) 18:46, 4 February 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: References

message: Can't resist putting in my 2 cents worth! Hi Doug, glad to see your posts. After much perusal of texts on archaeology of Americas, I am flummoxed by the sheer number of found artifacts/images/inscriptions/etc. in (particularly) North America which, upon any indication of a preColumbian eastern hemispheric connection, have been dismissed upon various grounds, very often as hoaxes. There have been at least 10's of thousands. I refer to Barry Fell's books "America BC" and "Saga America", Sorensen and Johanneson's "World Trade and Biological Exchanges Before 1492, Revised and Expanded Edition", Constance Irwin's "Fair Gods and Stone Faces", de Jonge and Wakefield's "Rocks and Rows" and "When the Sun God Came to America", Frank Joseph's "The Lost Worlds of Ancient America" and "The Lost Colonies of Ancient America". These alone should support the large number mentioned because there are often many extant examples of a particular kind of artifact/etc. ". The Bat Creek Stone is being held up as though it is a singular instance, but it is definitely not. Given this history of bias in the treatment of American artifacts (how many Clovis or Folsum points, atlatl weights or tipi rings are similarly disputed?) it seems that more of a neutral treatment is called for, in line with Wikipedia's policy of neutrality. Jwilsonjwilson (talk) 00:22, 6 March 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: "They All Discovered America" by Boland is an early example that coined the term "NEBC Principle" (which I think ought to have an explanatory article). Yeah it is funny how hoaxers and forgers living near the Atlantic coast from Labrador to Tierra Del Fuego all picked the same archaic Phoenician alphabet to conduct their pseudo-archaeology in, isn't it? However I am aware that Doug has been one of the most active voices on the Internet pointing this out since at least ca. 1995. Til Eulenspiegel /talk/ 21:58, 6 March 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Tens of thousands? Hardly. And don't blame me if interpreting various scratches, inscriptions, whatever as Phoenician has been popular, I'd say it has more to do with their being famous as seafarers so a n obvious choice for anyone who wants to say there were ancient visitors. Jwilson, I don't think you understand NPOV yet. Have you read it thoroughly? Dougweller (talk) 22:15, 6 March 2014 (UTC)
replies: text:  Hi Doug. Guess I'll have to peruse NPOV more thoroughly. Evidently it has nuances which have escaped me. Thanks for your input. By the bye, many inscriptions (or scratches if you prefer) found in the eastern US, seem interpretable as samples of the Q Celtic script called Ogam, which to be sure does bear much resemblance to scratches (plow scrapings?). The particular type mentioned by Barry Fell is Hinge Ogam, script No. 3 as noted in the Irish Book of Ballymote. I am impressed that some of Fell's decipherings of Ogam-like scratches from Pennsylvania enabled European epigraphers to be able to read some previously unreadable inscriptions engraved on stones on the Iberian peninsula. Jwilsonjwilson (talk) 06:54, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

text: Ah! I see. Whether or not a piece of evidence is perhaps included in a class of things which are judged in a particular way is not itself an indicator of a lack of neutrality vis-a-vis pieces of evidence not so judged. Likewise there is the criteria of reliable sources, where-in my sources mentioned will be less likely to be given the current climate in American archaeology, et.al. Also they don't tend to concentrate on the Bat Creek stone, particularly. Oh well. Jwilsonjwilson (talk) 07:51, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

text: Certainly not! A star bellied sneech?  Never! Til Eulenspiegel /talk/ 04:34, 21 March 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: 2014

message: To help the global readership, codes such as 40LD24 need explanation when first used, either in footnotes or in text. It appears such codes are Smithsonian trinomials. From the Tennessee Archaeology Network:County Abbreviations for Archaeological Site Numbers I suspect 40LD24 is decoded as 40=Tennessee, LD=Loudon, 24=serial number of site. I modified the article accordingly  --Senra (talk) 23:09, 28 February 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Codes need explaining 

message: The file source information for the image gives the source as follows:
:Original publication: Macoy, Robert, General History, Cyclopedia and Dictionary of Freemasonry, Masonic Publishing Co., New York, 3rd ed., 1868, p. 134.
:Immediate source: Original source, in library of Worthington OH Masonic Lodge.
I have never seen any of Macoy's books, but I have seen Youtube videos that show and extensively quote several of his books, sneaked out of Masonic Lodge libraries over the years, and explaining that these books aren't intended to be accessible to anyone unless they have been indoctrinated in Freemasonry a number of years. This is getting into heavy stuff and makes verification of the source more difficult. So with a book like that, I can't help but wonder how it came to just "turn up" in the debate as a source in response to the recent proposed reading of the language as Hebrew. Til Eulenspiegel /talk/ 13:30, 5 March 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Mainfort and Kwas cite it, as does Hu, as does Jason Colavito. It's on page 169 of the 1870 edition and you can see it here. I don't see how verifying it's a problem. Dougweller (talk) 14:04, 5 March 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Wow, thanks, Doug. I'm looking over that book now and it is a trip.  Macoy evidently didn't mean it to be read or even known about by the general public, so if someone used it for a hoax, they would probably have to be a high level freemason, right? Til Eulenspiegel /talk/ 14:48, 5 March 2013 (UTC)

text: It may have been closely guarded in the 19th c, but in order to get this scan, I just called up the Worthington lodge, asked if they had it, and if so could I see it.  They welcomed my visit, and even scanned it for me on their machine.  They had several editions, including the 1868 edition with the illustration, but not the 1870 edition M&K happened to cite.  I've seen the reprint edition for sale at Half Priced Books, so it's not exactly inaccessible today.  In any event, in the 19th c, a great many people were freemasons, so many people would have had access even if it was guarded then.  HuMcCulloch (talk) 15:21, 5 March 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: The big mystery is why Thomas or someone else in the BAE didn't spot the inscription as obviously Hebrew.  Fortunately they didn't or we would probably never have known of it.  HuMcCulloch (talk) 15:24, 5 March 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: I wonder if Thomas identified it as Cherokee because he was expecting Cherokees. PiCo (talk) 03:01, 6 March 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Question about 1870 (or is it 1868) book 

message: The matter of conflict of interest impacting the NPOV of this article are being discussed Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest/Noticeboard#Bat_Creek_inscription_and_User:HuMcCulloch. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 19:35, 6 March 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Conflict of interest discussion 

message: As requested by Dougweller in the previous talk section, here is my proposed lead section.  It's basically the version of 3/9, 1:39, with concessions to RedPen as explained above, plus mention of Feder's 2010 opinion, relocated to the last paragraph which discusses M&K 2004:
:The Bat Creek inscription (also called the Bat Creek stone or Bat Creek tablet) is an inscribed stone collected as part of a Native American burial mound excavation in Loudon County, Tennessee, in 1889 by the Smithsonian Bureau of Ethnology's Mound Survey, directed by entomologist Cyrus Thomas. The mound was located at the confluence of the Little Tennessee River and Bat Creek, in historical Overhill Cherokee territory a few miles north of modern Vonore.
:Thomas himself identified the characters on the stone as "beyond question letters of the Cherokee alphabet," a writing system for the Cherokee language invented by Sequoyah in the early 19th century.[1] The stone became the subject of contention in 1970 when Semitist Cyrus H. Gordon proposed that the letters of inscription are Paleo-Hebrew of the 1st or 2nd century AD rather than Cherokee, and therefore evidence of pre-Columbian transatlantic contact.[2] According to Gordon, five of the eight letters could be read as "for Judea." Archaeologist Marshall McKusick countered that "Despite some difficulties, Cherokee script is a closer match to that on the tablet than the late-Canaanite proposed by Gordon,"[3] but gave no details.
: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. 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 most likely 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."
:Mainfort and Kwas published a further article in American Antiquity 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. They conclude that the inscription is a fraud and 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.   Hoax expert Kenneth Feder says that their work has "demolished" any claims of the stone's authenticity [Feder (2010: 39).]
:(The last sentence of the first paragraph has been in the lead section since long before I became involved.  RedPen wants to cut it, but it is factual "where" information that helps explain why Thomas would jump to the conclusion that it is Cherokee, so I favor keeping it.  It used to be at the end of the lead section, along with another sentence about the 1970s salvage excavations which I cut as being too much detail for the lead. The first sentence of the proposed first paragraph, as originally written by PiCo, is a little run-on, but we can tinker with style later.)  76.232.35.218 (talk) 14:12, 19 March 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Proposed Lead revisions by HuMcCulloch 

message: I've added a statement about the relocation of the stone from the McClung Museum to the Museum of the Cherokee Indian, per statements to me by Tim Baumann of McClung and Barbara Duncan of the Museum of the Cherokee.  These facts are not controversial.  I've also added the Smithsonian's new statement on the stone, citing an e-mail from Jake Homiak at the Smithsonian to Barbara Duncan that was widely circulated.  Unfortunately, there is no press release to this effect on the Smithsonian's page at newsdesk.si.edu, but if someone could find one, that would be a better reference.  The Smithsonian is basically now on record that the inscription is a Smithsonian hoax (!), and, following Mainfort and Kwas, that LYHWD and LYHWH are the same word (!).  This is the same institution that assured the public it was genuine and Cherokee back in 1894.  Perhaps this new statement will stimulate some more public discussion. In particular, does the Smithsonian now repudiate the entire Mound Survey, or just the substantial portion that was due to John Emmert?  And if the latter, which sections and artifacts are now disavowed? HuMcCulloch (talk) 17:40, 25 March 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: Relocation and Smithsonian Statement

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: This sentence from the last para of the lead:  " The General History correctly translates the inscription "Holiness to the Lord," though "Holy to Yahweh" would be more precise."  To be precise, YHWH is Yahweh, and LYHWH is "to Yahweh". God knows what "the Lord" would be in ancient Hebrew, but not this.
More seriously, the lead is far too long. One para would be quite enough. The problem seems to be that the article is being edited by enthusiasts.PiCo (talk) 23:11, 3 November 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: The Tetragrammaton is and was commonly pronounced as "Adonai" by Jews, going at least as far back as early Hellenistic times, and this was traditionally rendered as "The Lord" in Bible translations starting with the Septuagint (see Kyrios) down through the 19th century (the American Standard Version was the first significant departure from this tradition, and not an improvement in the eyes of many). AnonMoos (talk) 11:10, 28 August 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  YHWH and The Lord 

message: Here is a condensed lead with citations I am thinking of adding:
The Bat Creek inscription is an inscribed stone tablet. The tablet was excavated by John W. Emmert on February 14, 1889 from Tipton Mound 3[1]. The inscription was found during a series of exactions of Hopewell mounds in Loundon County, Tennessee. The aim of the excavations was to shed light on who had built the mounds covering the Eastern United States[1].
When the Bat Creek tablet was discovered by Emmert, Cyrus Thomas was the director of the Division of Mound Exploration. Initially, Thomas concluded the inscription presented letters from the Cherokee alphabet.[2] However, this claim was refuted in the 1970’s when scholar of Near Eastern Cultures and ancient languages, Cyrus H. Gordon proposed the inscribed letters represented Paleo-Hebrew of the 1st or 2nd century[2]. According to Gordon, five of the eight letters could be read as "for Judea." Following Gordon’s claims, further arguments arose promoting both sides of the debate. Notably, in a 1991 reply, archaeologists Robert Mainfort and Mary Kwas, concluded the inscription is not genuine paleo-Hebrew but rather a 19th-century forgery[2]. And 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.” McCarter concluded, "It seems probable that we are dealing here not with a coincidental similarity but with a fraud.[3]" In 2004, further contributing to the growing body of evidence that the inscription is a hoax, Mainfort and Kwas published an article that included an illustration from an 1870 Masonic reference book with striking similarities to the Bat Creek inscription[2]. In the article, they provide evidence for their argument that the inscription is an attempted copy of the phrase “holy yahweh” from a freemason book readily accessible in the 1880’s.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ecp7201 (talk • contribs) 00:17, 31 March 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  New Lead 

message: :The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion. 
The result of the move request was: moved. (closed by non-admin page mover) – robertsky (talk) 12:00, 4 September 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Bat Creek inscription →  – A search suggests that this is the most common name in reliable sources. Doug Weller talk 14:23, 21 August 2022 (UTC)

text: Note: WikiProject Archaeology has been notified of this discussion. – robertsky (talk) 09:53, 28 August 2022 (UTC)

text: Note: WikiProject Tennessee has been notified of this discussion. – robertsky (talk) 09:53, 28 August 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Requested move 21 August 2022