<Bat Creek Stone <Bat Creek Stone
FROM: HERE: http://www.econ.ohio-state.edu/jhm/arch/batcrk.html
The Bat Creek Stone was discovered in 1889 in an undisturbed burial mound in Eastern Tennessee by the Smithsonian's Mound Survey project.
In 1971, Cyrus Gordon identified the letters inscribed on the stone as Paleo-Hebrew of approximately the first or second century A.D. According to him, the five letters to the left of the comma-shaped word divider read, from right to left, LYHWD, or "for Judea."
In 1988, wood fragments found with the inscription were Carbon-14 dated to somewhere between 32 A.D. and 769 A.D. These dates are consistent with the apparent date of the letters.
Today the stone resides out of sight in a back room of the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.
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References
Cyrus Thomas, "Mound Explorations," in Twelfth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1890-91 (Washington, GPO, 1894), pp. 391-4.
Cyrus Gordon, Before Columbus (New York, Crown, 1971), Appendix.
Lowell Kirk, "The Bat Creek Stone," a webpage of The Tellico Plains Mountain Press, undated.
J. Huston McCulloch, "The Bat Creek Inscription -- Cherokee or Hebrew?," Tennessee Anthropologist 1988(2), pp. 79-123. See also comment by Robert C. Mainfort, Jr. and Mary L. Kwas, TA 1991(1), pp. 1-19, reply by JHM TA Spring 1993, pp. 1-16, rejoinder by M&K, TA Fall 1993, pp. 87-93.
J. Huston McCulloch, "The Bat Creek Inscription: Did Judean Refugees Escape to Tennessee?" Biblical Archaeology Review July/August 1993, pp. 46-53 ff. See also comment by P. Kyle McCarter, BAR July/August 1993, pp. 54-55 ff., reply by JHM BAR Nov./Dec. 1993, pp. 14-16, and numerous letters, esp. those by Robt. R. Stieglitz and Marshall McKusick, in the Nov./Dec. 1993 and Jan./Feb. 1994 BAR .