Newark Holy Stones

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.

David Wyrick, a county surveyor and antiquarian, reported the finds in 1860: first the Keystone, pulled from a pit near the Newark earthworks, and then the Decalogue Stone, said to have come from within a burial mound, enclosed in a fitted sandstone box. The discoveries were quickly publicised and drew both enthusiasm and suspicion. They landed in the middle of the mound-builder debate, in which some argued the earthworks were the work of a lost Old World people rather than the ancestors of Native Americans, a position often bound up with biblical and racial theorising.

The stones seemed to supply physical evidence for an ancient Hebrew presence, and interested parties took them up accordingly. Their provenance, however, rested on Wyrick's reports, and doubts about how and by whom they had been placed attended them from the beginning; a local associate of Wyrick was later implicated in a related planting of "holy stones."

The claim was that the stones proved ancient Hebrews in pre-Columbian Ohio. The evidence against authenticity is decisive and of several kinds. The Hebrew of the inscriptions uses a modern square script with post-biblical letter-forms, not any script that could plausibly date to antiquity; the carving is clean and uniform in a way inconsistent with prehistoric Hopewell stonework; and the geological and workshop character of the objects points to the nineteenth century.

The early observer Charles Whittlesey already recognised the writing as modern, and the fullest modern treatment, by the Ohio Historical Society archaeologist Bradley Lepper with Jeff Gill, lays out both the technical case for forgery and the social pressures, religious literalism and racial politics, that made such a forgery attractive and durable. No credible archaeological authority today defends the stones as genuine. They are retained and displayed as forgeries of historical interest, not as ancient artifacts.