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All the United States North Carolina Cherokee Bat Creek Stone

Bat Creek Stone

Cherokee alphabet, proof of ancient North American Jews, or just a hoax?

Cherokee, North Carolina

Added By
meltingknight
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The Bat Creek stone.   Scott Wolter/cc by-sa 3.0
The Bat Creek stone.   Scott Wolter/cc by-sa 3.0
The stone’s exhibit.   HuMcCulloch/cc by-sa 4.0
The Masonic inscription.   HuMcCulloch/public domain
  parkcarolyn / Atlas Obscura User
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About

When John W. Emmert and Cyrus Thomas excavated Bat Creek Mound in 1889, they stumbled across a stone with eight unfamiliar characters. When Thomas saw it, he announced it as "beyond question letters of the Cherokee alphabet."

The stone was forgotten for around 70 years until an ethnologist named Joseph Mahan was confused by the fact that the letters didn't look like Cherokee. He sent a photo to his friend Cyrus Gordon, who realized that flipped upside down, the characters looked exactly like Paleo-Hebrew letters.

This caused a stir within the scientific community. If true, the word to the left of the comma-shaped word divider meant "for Judea." In 1988, Professor J. Huston McCulloch reinforced the idea of the tablet showing Hebrew. In 1991, Mary Kwas and Robert Mainfort found out that it was likely Emmert had carved the marks into the stone as a means of job security. If he found an artifact in one of the mounds, that meant he would get more funding to explore more mounds.

In 2004, Mainfort and Kwas discovered a Masonic reference book from 1870 that had a picture nearly identical to the Bat Creek inscription. This eliminated almost all doubt that the Bat Creek inscription was fake.

The stone was in the possession of the Museum of Natural History until 2001, then was loaned to the McClung Museum in Tennessee from 2002 to 2013. In 2015, it was moved to its current location at the Museum of the Cherokee in Cherokee, North Carolina.

As of January 2023: no employee of the museum has heard of or seen the stone. Although the museum is still well worth the visit it appears that the stone is no longer housed there.

Related Tags

Museums Museums And Collections Mystery Hoaxes Hoaxes And Pseudoscience

Know Before You Go

The museum is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Community Contributors

Added By

meltingknight

Edited By

GiaSuong, parkcarolyn

  • GiaSuong
  • parkcarolyn

Published

November 20, 2018

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Sources
  • https://www.asc.ohio-state.edu/mcculloch.2/arch/batcrk.html
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_Creek_inscription
Bat Creek Stone
589 Tsali Blvd
Cherokee, North Carolina
United States
35.484541, -83.316389
Visit Website
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Nearby Places

Unto These Hills Cherokee Theatre

Cherokee, North Carolina

miles away

Mountain Farm Museum

Cherokee, North Carolina

miles away

Barkers Creek Swinging Bridge

Whittier, North Carolina

miles away

Explore the Destination Guide

Photo of Cherokee

Cherokee

North Carolina

Places 3

Nearby Places

Unto These Hills Cherokee Theatre

Cherokee, North Carolina

miles away

Mountain Farm Museum

Cherokee, North Carolina

miles away

Barkers Creek Swinging Bridge

Whittier, North Carolina

miles away

Explore the Destination Guide

Photo of Cherokee

Cherokee

North Carolina

Places 3

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