Secrets of Ancient America: Archaeoastronomy and the Legacy of the Phoenicians, Celts, and Other Forgotten Explorers
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While there is certainty as to the inscription being Hebrew, there remains a question as to its antiquity. Advocates for its authenticity cite the unique shape of one letter representing the letter Q that appears in the fifth line of the inscription, a shape that was not known to modern scholars before 1884. This was thirteen years after Franz Huning’s claim to have been shown the site in 1871 by a man who had seen it as a boy. This unique etching of the letter Q is used to prove the authenticity of the Hidden Mountain inscription and its lettering style, said to have originated among the Spanish Jews.20 However, this is problematic, because the first recorded mention of the site occurred in 1933, when archaeologist and professor Frank Hibben (1910–2002) reported it. This leaves questions about the earlier date of 1871, and so it is insufficient to prove Deal’s claims.
Mainstream archaeologists are quick to write off the authenticity of the Los Lunas stone. Archaeologist Kenneth L. Feder considers the stone to be a fake because of the very crisp inscriptions, apparently not recognizing that Old World travelers in America would have naturally used metal tools. But Feder’s main concern is the lack of any archaeological context. He argues that the diffusionist claims in general would have required whoever inscribed it to stop along the way.
[There they would have] encamped, eaten food, broken things, disposed of trash, performed rituals, and so on. And those actions should have left a trail of physical archaeological evidence across the greater American Southwest, discovery of which would undeniably prove the existence of foreigners in New Mexico in antiquity with a demonstrably ancient Hebrew material culture. . . . There are no pre-Columbian ancient Hebrew settlements, no sites containing the everyday detritus of a band of ancient Hebrews, nothing that even a cursory knowledge of how the archaeological record forms would demand there would be. From an archaeological standpoint, that’s plainly impossible.21
Fig. 14.7. Military-style defensible rock shelters at Hidden Mountain, New Mexico.
However, Feder’s objections are at least partially overcome by two locations on Hidden Mountain. These are ruins of rock shelters whose tentlike dwellings were dug out and had stacked stone walls. In addition to these structures, there are ruins indicating an encampment complex, including a potential animal enclosure. Moreover, when viewed from the air, the Hidden Mountain site is a defensible mountain location with some resemblances to another defensible Hebrew fortress, Masada, that heroically held out before falling to the Romans in the first century A.D.
In summation, I found the Hidden Mountain inscriptions to be compelling. However, since I cannot authenticate the age of the Hebrew inscriptions, it is not possible with certainty to declare them to be either thousands of years old or of recent manufacture.
HIDDEN MOUNTAIN CONSTELLATIONS
However, there are other things to consider about the age of Hidden Mountain. David Deal also reported that the site contains a rock art rendering of constellations, which he was able to tie to an historical event. Referred to as the “zodiac map,” it is a flat horizontal rock with petroglyphs that seem to record the constellations in the sky when a solar eclipse occurred in 107 B.C. Initially discovered by Phillip Leonard, this zodiac map was first reported by McGlone and Leonard in a 1984 article. 22
Fig. 14.8. The Hidden Mountain “zodiac map” petroglyphs.
According to Deal, each of the pecked rock art images represent constellations specific to Semitic cultures, which would rule out their being made by native peoples. On this particular date, according to Deal, there was also a major three-planet conjunction that was seen worldwide, which would have been an amazing event to witness.23 He also interpreted the petroglyphs as quite clearly recording a solar eclipse in the position of what we call the constellation Virgo.24
In short, by overlaying a modern computer-generated sky chart as seen in New Mexico on September 15, 107 B.C., onto the Hidden Mountain star chart petroglyphs, Deal demonstrated a connection that fits with the dating of the epigraphy on the inscription and supports the idea that the Los Lunas Decalogue Stone is an approximately two-thousand-year-old Hebrew inscription.
OTHER HIDDEN MOUNTAIN CONNECTIONS
Most visitors to Hidden Mountain confine themselves to walking the one-half-mile hike to the Decalogue Stone and then leave without seeing many other important petroglyphs found above the inscription and around the Hidden Mountain location. Besides the short Hebrew inscription at the top, there are remains of the encampments and several major petroglyph fields. For example, about one hundred yards above the Decalogue Stone on the western side of the ravine that leads to the top, there is a panel containing a grouping of finely etched petroglyphs. The inscriptions are small but striking in that they portray similar themes as depicted in a famous Mayan stela from Izapa, Mexico, located near the Guatemalan border. Izapa Stela 5 has been dated to roughly 300 B.C., and both the Los Lunas panel and the Mayan stela inscription have pyramid shapes, a central tree, and snakelike images perpendicular to the tree, along with men who have pointy hats.
Fig. 14.9. Izapa Stela 5. (Drawing by madman2001)
Fig. 14.10. The Izapa-looking motif from the panel at Hidden Mountain, New Mexico. A natural triangle created by cracks frames the tree and serpent.
Fig. 14.11. The Izapa-looking motif from Hidden Mountain with enhancements by author.
The Hidden Mountain etching or “scratching” technique differs from the method used for the Decalogue Stone and the pecking of the zodiac map, and this challenges the authenticity of these particular Los Lunas glyphs. However, it is possible that Hebrews could have landed on the eastern coast of Mexico and traveled inland through Izapa, Mexico, and on up to the New Mexico region. Or this could have been inscribed by a later group of travelers familiar with the basic story portrayed in Izapa. This is but one more enigma of the Hidden Mountain site.
At one point in my investigations, it occurred to me that the Decalogue Stone, placed as it was in the gully leading up to the Hidden Mountain camp above, could have served a purpose as a symbolic and welcoming mezuzah. (Mezuzahs are affixed to doorways of Jewish homes and contain biblical verses.) This is consistent with Gordon’s proposal that the Los Lunas Decalogue Stone is a Samaritan mezuzah and that the location would have been an ideal place for pilgrims to stop after their long journey and to offer prayers before entering the Hidden Mountain camp.25
Moreover, two of many mysterious glyphs found near the Decalogue Stone at Hidden Mountain depict long-tailed, mystical-looking creatures who could have been guards of the entrance to the settlement site that was above.
Fig. 14.12. One of the creatures who could have been a Hidden Mountain guardian.
Fig. 14.13. The other long-tailed creature guarding the Hidden Mountain site.
While I remain convinced of their authenticity after visiting the site, all in all, the Hebrew inscriptions at Hidden Mountain remain controversial. But to many, including me, they seem to be an incredible piece of evidence that wandering Hebrews once made religious pilgrimages to what is now New Mexico. After all, why would anyone go to the considerable trouble of inscribing fake ancient Hebrew characters on the stone, and why would no one in the community have made a note of this?
ARTIFACTS FROM CALALUS, “AN UNKNOWN LAND” IN THE ARIZONA DESERT
While archaeologists continue to believe that “legitimate artifacts” are missing from the area’s historical record, in Arizona, southwest of Hidden Mountain, the archaeological evidence is more solid.
Near Tucson, about five hundred miles south from Hidden Mountain, thirty-one artifacts possibly more than a thousand years old and apparently from a Roman Jewish colony were discovered during the 1920s. If genuine, they indicate the existence of a colony or at least a group of travelers in what they called “Calalus,” which was referred to as “an unknown land.” Records on large lead crosses written mostly in Latin but accompanied by Hebrew lettering were found with dates from A.D. 765 to A.D. 900. These artifacts are now stored in the Arizona History Museum in Tucso
n, which is run by the Arizona Historical Society.
Unlike many ancient inscriptions in America with controversial or uncorroborated interpretations, these inscriptions are easily read in Latin, despite their poor, almost childlike grammar. Wake Forest University history professor emeritus and prolific writer Cyclone Covey painstakingly studied the relics and their history and in 1975 published Calalus: A Roman Jewish Colony in America from the Time of Charlemagne through Alfred the Great.26
Covey stated that significant drivers for migrations of ancient peoples to the New World would have been weather and geological disruptions, along with war and repression. In the case of colonists or travelers ca. A.D. 765, the earliest date mentioned on the crosses, Covey concluded that they were fleeing the repressions of the Romans, suggesting that this coincided with a gradual resumption of Jewish marine mercantilism in Alexandria, Egypt. The “doorway ports” for Jews wishing for a new start in life would have been the ports of Cyrene in Libya, the Greek cities of Ionia, and Alexandria in Egypt. At that time, Alexandria, founded by Alexander the Great, was home to the largest urban Jewish population in the world.27
Fig. 14.14. Lead cross from Calalus bearing Latin writing. The face sides of the crosses were riveted together and each cross stood 1.5 feet tall and weighed more than sixty pounds. (Photo from Ancient American, vol. 10, no. 66, 12)
Fig. 14.15. Detail of another lead cross from Calalus bearing Latin writing. (Photo from Ancient American, vol. 10, no. 66, 13)
The background story to Covey’s work involves Charles E. Manier, a disabled World War I veteran who lived in Tucson. In 1924, he was inspecting an old limekiln along a roadway when he discovered a piece of metal protruding three inches out of an eroded bank. He was unaware that two swords had been discovered forty years earlier in the same area but had since disappeared. The object was firmly set in caliche, a hardened rock deposit of calcium carbonate that naturally cements together gravel, sand, and clay in the hot and dry Southwest. Using a pickaxe, Manier extracted a 62.5-pound earth-molded lead cross, 1.5 feet high and composed of two symmetrical crosses riveted together, with writing covered with wax on the inside surfaces, apparently to preserve it.
Once the wax was removed, a Latin inscription became visible. “We are carried forward on the sea . . . Calalus . . . to an unknown land.” Athough there were many grammatical errors in the rendering, the intention of the writer was to record that, “We were carried (or sailed) by sea from Rome to Calalus [an unknown land]. We came in the Year of Our Lord 775 and Theodorus ruled over the people.”
Later in 1924, Manier formed a partnership with Thomas W. Bent, an employee of the Public Health Service whom he had met earlier at a veteran organization activity and they planned some explorations together. On November 25 they discovered another cross that weighed twelve pounds, with Latin on both sides. Five days later they found a five-pound, single-half cross, and over the next several years, a total of thirty-one artifacts were extracted from the solid caliche.
Concerning the Calalus artifacts, Covey wrote that they “had been strewn at random as if lying where they dropped during a final battle. Except perhaps for three ceremonial objects, these relics must have been molded in the vicinity where they were found, because a discarded trial engraving on a chunk of caliche and a trial mold of the same memorial in lead, which would not have been worth carrying any distance, turned up amid the finished products.”28
When considered as a whole, most of the Calalus inscriptions are Latin, with Hebrew phrases or letters etched on the ceremonial objects, while the author of the narrative refers to himself by the seemingly nonaffiliated name of “OL.” Thus, the diluted form of the script is not surprising; since OL was writing over a hundred years after the colony would have been founded. Despite his faulty command of Latin, if the artifacts are genuine, OL provided a sustained sequential account that memorialized the circumstances and dates of the Calalus colony.
The pieced-together Latin narrative begins in A.D. 765, but no details of the voyage are provided. After arriving, the colonists or explorers led by Theodorus founded a city they named Rhoda and encountered a chief named Toltezus, or perhaps natives called the Toltezus, who fought them and took away “seven hundred captives.” The colonists rallied behind their next king, Jacob, who renewed Rhoda while counterattacking the Toltezus. Jacob died in 785 and was followed by Israel I, who defeated the Toltezus in 790 and subjugated them to colonial rule. For more than a hundred years their fortunes ebbed and flowed until, finally, the tide turned against them in 883 when they had to take refuge inside the city walls. Around 888, OL recalled the heyday of Calalus during the reign of Israel I but was apparently under duress as he composed the chronicle of the last year or two of the war, which probably ended around A.D. 900. He regretted that he did not adequately memorialize Calalus in its glory and wrote, “It is uncertain how long life will continue. There are many things, which can be said while the war rages. Three thousand were killed. The leader with his principal men are captured.”29
The site of the mentioned city of Rhoda, or any other colonist occupation in Arizona, has not been discovered. I was, however, fortunate to be able to view the relics at the Arizona History Museum in Tucson where the Calalus artifacts are stored (but not displayed). The museum was most cooperative, and an employee handled each one of the artifacts, permitting me to closely examine and photograph them. While the large crosses appeared crude and clunky, many of the other artifacts reflected skill and devotion to how they were crafted.
According to Covey:
Notwithstanding the crudity of the Latin and the portraiture of the crosses, anyone who directly observes and handles the artifacts cannot but be impressed by the painstaking, loving care which wrought them. Then his minutest examination can detect nothing anachronistic in the early-medieval style of their paleography or symbolism. Besides the names of the kings, much else on the gun-barrel blue to light-lead gray artifacts confirms the colony to have been Jewish: a menorah with seven burning candles, a pair of Hebrew goblet-chalices (habdalah), incense spoons, burning incense, numerals I–X in double column surely signifying the Ten Commandments, and words in carefully-drawn square qadash, and gaddash (“holy” or “He [or it] is holy,” elohim (“God”), goi gadol (“a great nation”) etc. The colonists evidently represented a heretical Jewish sect.30
The suggestion that the citizens of Calalus were heretics and semi-Christianized is reinforced by the presence of the two nehushtans as central symbols. Nehushtans are religious objects that involve the placement of snakes on a staff to convey an image similar to the caduceus or staff of Mercury. In the Jewish faith, they had ceased to be orthodox after the time of King Hezekiah around 700 B.C. (2 Kings 18:4).
Another animal image is a mysterious “dinosaur” on a short sword that, understandably, has caused much comment. Its use may have been inspired by the book of Isaiah in the Old Testament that reads, “In that day the Lord with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea.”31
The two nehushtans from Calalus each have a rattlesnake that coils up and around the cross, but rattlesnakes are only found in the Americas. The reverse of one of them reads “Nahash” (Serpent), and the reverse of the second one has an engraving of a striking snake together with two crawling snakes.
Another image on the artifacts is a geometrical design, possibly the colonial kingdom’s coat of arms, which is found in several places, including the memorial crosses, the nehushtans, and on a military standard called a labarum.*23 This unusual symbol is composed of a geometrical design with a central square and is repeated six times on the engraved artifacts.
However, a coat of arms is not the only suggestion of what the designs could mean. Covey suggested that it could represent the floor plan of a temple or the ground plan of the territory, noting that the Hebrew words shemona peoth, which refer to “eight segments” or
“eight divisions,” are found near the symbol on one object.32 This assessment is consistent with the phrase stating that one of the kings “commanded a council of allied colonial cities.”
Another common motif is a rounded building or temple, and this, along with the crosses and angels, suggests an early intermingling of Christian and Jewish symbols during the eighth century. Covey ends his investigation of Calalus with the following observation: “If the Calalus colonists ever saw the Los Lunas Stone [from New Mexico], supposing they rowed and/or walked the Puercos [River] route from the Rio Grande to the San Jose on their way to the Santa Cruz [river], they must have marveled at this inscription, which they probably could not read.”33
Since Covey’s seminal work on Calalus, little scholarly work has been completed, but several articles have appeared, and there are now scores of Internet sites with commentary of one kind or another.34 For example, one blogger suggested that Theodorus, the first king of Calalus, was not a Jewish leader in Rome, as suggested by Covey, but was the Jewish king of Septimania, a Roman Jewish state in southern France.
Of course, many skeptics continued to insist that the Calalus relics were a hoax. Professor Frank H. Fowler, who originally translated the Latin inscriptions, was quoted as stating that the Calalus inscriptions closely resembled quotes from classical writers, including Cicero and Vigil, found in Latin grammar books as early as 1881. Other doubters of their authenticity claimed to have identified Timoteo Odohui, a young local sculptor who was interested in lead casting and languages, as capable of carrying out the ruse.35