Bat Creek Inscription
© Scott WolterA reflected light image of the controversial Bat Creek Stone.
The Bat Creek stone was discovered in a small mound near Knoxville, Tennessee, USA. The archaeologists who dug it up in 1889 discovered a small stone tablet engraved with several mysterious alphabetic characters.

The stone was discovered by a team led by entomologist Cyrus Thomas from the Smithsonian Bureau of Ethnology's Mound Survey. Eight years earlier, Congress assigned the Institute to complete archaeological excavations. The main goal was to explore the prehistoric mounds. After just a few years of work, archaeologists had collected over 40,000 artifacts and wrote a seven-hundred-page report of their findings, which was presented in 1894.

Thomas wondered if the tablet with the inscription was created in a pre-Columbian language. He was fascinated with the tablet and its secrets, however he didn't have enough knowledge or tools to examine the discovery properly. Now, his reports from the excavations are not considered a serious archaeological resource. Nonetheless, one of his discoveries, known as the Bat Creek stone, helped Thomas leave his mark.

A Strange Language

Soon after the discovery, Cyrus Thomas was convinced that the inscription was created with the Cherokee alphabet. The Cherokee alphabet was created by Sequoyah, a Cherokee silversmith. His English name was George Gist or Guess, and he created a syllabary to write down the Cherokee language. The syllabary was adopted in 1825 by the Cherokee Nation, which was illiterate before that. The syllabary was firstly created with logograms, but with time Sequoyah created a system of 85 characters to write down the Cherokee language. The symbols look similar to Greek, Latin, and Cyrillic.

Bat Creek Inscription
© Public DomainThomas’ publication of the inscription in his ‘The Cherokees in Pre-Columbian Times’ (1890).
Over seven decades later, in the 1960s, two other researchers, Henriette Mertz and Corey Ayoob, noticed that the inscription looks like ancient Semitic writing. Moreover, the specialist in late Semitic languages, Cyrus Gordon, asserted in the 1970s that the language identified previously as Cherokee is a Paleo-Hebrew language. He dated the inscription to the first or second century AD. He also read the five letters from the right to the left (as it should be read in a Hebrew language) and transcribed LYHWD, meaning ''for Judea''. Other interpretations suggest that the text reads LYHWD(M), ''for the Judeans'', ''only for Judea'', or ''only for the Judeans''. According to these interpretations, the ancient Hebrew language used in the inscription was something between the language used in the Siloam inscription and the Qumran Paleo-Hebrew Leviticus scroll.

Bat Creek Inscription
© Public DomainMasonic artist's impression of Biblical phrase QDSh LYHWH in Paleo-Hebrew script (Macoy 1868: 134).
Another theory suggests that the writing could be a Welsh Coelbren language. According to Alan Wilson, Baram A. Blackett, and Jim Michael, the tablet was inscribed with the ancient Welsh Coelbren alphabet. The researchers read it as ''Madoc the ruler he is''. They suppose that the Bat Creek tumulus was found in the tomb of Prince Madoc, who sailed to America in 1170 AD, or the brother of King Arthur II, who sailed there in 562 AD.

Both of the hypotheses have been well researched but there is no clear answer to this problem. Thus, scientists must look for other ways to find the origins of the artifact.

More Unsolved Features of an Ancient Tablet

The dating of the tablet is also a controversial issue. Radiocarbon dating suggests that it was created between 32 and 769 AD or 45 BC - 200 AD. The dates were made with fragments of artifacts discovered near the tablet. It is impossible to receive satisfactory results of the radiocarbon tests for the tablet because it was touched by too many people and influenced by too many substances after its discovery.

Currently the Bat Creek stone belongs to the Smithsonian Institution in the Department of Anthropology collection. It was loaned to the Museum of the Cherokee Indian in Cherokee and was also on display in the Frank H. McClung Museum at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville for a time.

Bat Creek
© Brian Stansberry/ CC BY 3.0Bat Creek in Loudon County, Tennessee.
The mound the tablet was found in has been plowed flat, so its location is forgotten - only descriptions of it have survived. According to the notes written by 19th century archaeologists, the Bat Creek Mound contained 9 burials. The owner of the land cut down trees growing on the mound 40 years before the excavations began. He discovered that something interesting was located under the trees. Years later, archaeologists found out that he was right. The roots of the trees entered the tombs and went down to the skeletons.

Ancient Travelers to the Americas

Legends about ancient travelers to the Americas have not been accepted by conventional history. Apart from medieval Norse expeditions, Polynesians, Japanese, and other peoples supposedly reached the Americas before Columbus did. It has even been proposed that in ancient times the Phoenicians may have traveled to lands that were later called the "New World." This civilization could have brought other Semitic cultures on their ships - a possible explanation for the inscription of the Bat Creek tablet.

Not all researchers are convinced on the antiquity of the Black Creek tablet. They claim that it could have been created by people in the 19th century. There are plenty of reasons behind this view as well. Some believe that it could have been related to the growing influence of Masons.


Apart from this, many theories related to the Bat Creek tablet suggest that it was meant to confirm theories about the origins of the early inhabitants of the Americas. Supporters of this hypothesis say that Europeans wanted to prove that the land colonized by them belonged to them in antiquity too. Faking evidence to support their ownership could be a possibility. Unfortunately, as long as the mound remains lost and no more evidence appears, it seems that the problem of the Bat Creek stone will remain unsolved.