Overview

The Newark Holy Stones are a small group of inscribed stone objects said to have been recovered in 1860 from the ancient earthworks around Newark, Ohio. The two most important are the Keystone, a wedge-shaped stone bearing short Hebrew phrases, and the Decalogue Stone, a black stone carved with a condensed Hebrew text of the Ten Commandments wrapped around the figure of a robed man labelled Moses, found inside a stone box.

Presented as proof that ancient Hebrews had reached North America, they intervened directly in a heated nineteenth-century controversy about who had built the great mounds of the Ohio Valley. Scholarly examination, both at the time and since, has judged them modern forgeries, most likely carved around 1860. The site records them as debunked but keeps them in view, because the episode illuminates how forged artifacts were enlisted in period debates over scripture, race, and American antiquity. The objects themselves survive and are held by a museum in Coshocton, Ohio.