Ancient Hebrew Inscribed on a Rock in New Mexico
Picture this: You're an archaeologist minding your own business in New Mexico when a guy comes up and tells you he's got something to show you. Once you check to make sure he's wearing pants and double check to make sure you've got a gun, you follow him to this town outside Albuquerque called Los Lunas. And there he shows you a 90-ton rock inscribed with ancient writing. No big deal, right? Everyone knows Native Americans have lived in the area since at least the 1850s, it's only natural they'd scratch some graffiti up every now and then. People get bored.
Getty
Things to do in Old New Mexico: Die, watch other people die, make pottery.
This is exactly what happened to archaeology professor Frank Hibben in 1933. Only he had the sense to recognize that the scribbling wasn't Native American writing -- it was Hebrew. Ancient Hebrew. And the message wasn't "Custer sux balls," it was the Ten Commandments.
The Find:
Believe it or not, while people in the 1930s were gullible enough to think Martians were invading Earth in the most melodramatic way possible, they were cynical enough to call bullshit at the claim that anyone in ancient America knew Hebrew. Yet when experts took a look, they were confounded. For one thing, the script included some Greek letters, which indicated that the script was etched by someone comfortable with mixing Greek and Hebrew (if no one comes to mind, ancient Samaritans fit that bill perfectly).
Wikipedia
They're the ones who didn't cross the road to get to the other side because their religion bans jokes.
So that was weird. And the rock was the same basalt of the mountain right behind it, so it was definitely local. But that doesn't mean that the ancient script on the rock was ancient, right? Any old American with a theology degree and a chisel could have done it (again, there was literally nothing else to do for entertainment back then). It also doesn't help that the guy who discovered the rock in the first place was later implicated in artifact fraud (though the allegations were never proven). The whole thing was just too weird to be anything but a hoax.
idahoptv
"Oh sure, but if we wrote 'Elvis lives' in Latin, everyone would believe it."
Yet when a modern geologist examined the inscriptions and compared them with carvings nearby, he concluded that the scratchings could be between 500 and 2,000 years old. And that's as much as we'll presumably ever know -- by this point, too many people have handled the artifact for dating tests to get any kind of accurate results.
ohio-state
If legit, it would explain why the local tribes have such kickass bagels.