Linguistic Analysis of the Burrows Cave Hoax

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Introduction

The Burrows Cave collection represent group of more than three thousand artifacts allegedly discovered by Mr. Russell Burrows at a cave in an undisclosed location in Illinois. The Egyptian and eastern Mediterranean motifs found in artifacts from Burrows Cave has led to considerable speculation and controversy. Cuneiform, Etruscan, Phoenician, Egyptian, and other characters are found on Burrows Cave. If valid, the implications of the Burrows Cave would be astounding. The sheer quantity of inscribed artifacts, if valid, could rewrite the history — and, if false, would appear to constitute the second largest archaeological fraud (after the Michigan Tablets) in history. While there has been much written, pro and con, about the Burrows Cave, to my knowledge no serious linguistic analysis of the Burrows Cave artifacts has been performed to date. I therefore felt that linguistic analysis was warranted to either validate artifacts for further inquiry or to put the matter to rest to ensure that the time of future scholars is not wasted on a prolific hoax.

Linguistic Analysis

After nearly a month of intensive linguistic study of the Burrows Cave artifacts, my analysis has led me to conclude that they are modern hoaxes. Some of the Burrows Cave character sequences were copied from authentic sources and therefore actually made sense. It is the great mass of all the other inscriptions that were random sequences of characters which ultimately destroys their credibility. Attempts at translation of the tablets said to come from the cave have led to serious inconsistencies. The same characters have been used in widely different ways that defy exhaustive attempts at reconciliation. The Burrows Cave artifacts cover a much broader range of characters than any known language. As I have gotten deeper into them, I have failed to come up with a rational explanation as to why

It is not enough to demonstrate that a word or a phrase seems to make sense and even seems to be contextually correct, as anyone can copy genuine inscriptions with slight modifications. Those same characters need to continue to make sense and be used in a consistent fashion throughout the entire corpus of literature. Any character or even string of characters can seem to make sense in isolation, but it needs to be validated by all the rest of the occurrences throughout the entire corpus. The BC artifacts do not meet this necessary criterion

The representations of the text on the Cuenca stone from Ecuador, as portrayed by the BC artifacts, each contains less information than the Cuenca stone itself, and are also used in contexts which do not make any sense according to its translation.

Many of the Burrows Cave artifacts contain characters which exist only on the Michigan tablets, including the so-called “mystery symbol” among others. As I have documented, the Michigan tablets fail to convey elements of rational language on linguistic analysis, and the visual content conveys popular nineteenth-century interpretations of Old Testament events that are inconsistent with scripture and historical sources. Only a hoax would copy another hoax!

The existence of a copy of the cartouche of Pharaoh Merneptah [ca. 1200 BC] is inconsistent with the time frame of the culture in question, which left Egypt about seven hundred years earlier.

Photo (c) Wayne May. Posted with permission.

Here is a chart I have prepared to explain in detail the process of translation in this case:

Burrow’s Cave	Gesenius value	Old Italic value	Etrurian value	Etruscan value	TC value	PSUPC value	Wiki value	TPA value
V	11H 5Y,J	V	P,B	V				Y*
D	1-4D		R	R		D,R	D
Φ)	10K 10TH		O	PH				Q
h	1-11H	H	E	E	H	H	E	H

BC: Characters found on Burrows Cave artifacts.

Gesenius value: The value listed on any or all of the charts given in his Table of Alphabets on pages x and xi of his Hebrew Grammar, 1909.

Old Italic value: Value listed in Oldest Characters chart of Grammatography: A manual of reference to the Alphabets of Ancient and Modern Languages, based on the German compilation of F. Ballhorn, London, Trübner and Co., 1861, pp. 8-9.

Etrurian: ibid., Old Etruscan.

Etruscan: Dizionario della lingua etrusca, Arnaldo d’Aversa, Paideia Editrice, Brescia, Italy, 1994, p. xiv.

TC value: The character occurs on my Ten Commandments chart I made long ago.

PSUPC value: Proto-Sinaitic, Utaritic & Phoenician Sign Chart

Wiki value: Chart given in the Wikipedia

TPA value: Table of the Phoenician Alphabet

The first letter, V, is not recognized by scholars as a Phoenician letter. The Old World version has a tiny tail at the bottom.

The second letter is only approximately represented here. The right side is vertical and has a very slight extension upward and downward.

The third character is not recognized by scholars to exist in any language here, but is approximated by the two characters. The original has a vertical line but it does not cross the circle to the outside. It occurs in the Joseph Smith Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language and is called FLOS ISIS. Here it has the value of a vowel.

The fourth character had a value in the language of Adam as H but when the Greeks borrowed it, they assigned the value E to it. For example, in Adamic we have Master “MAHAN” (Moses 5:31,49) which is preserved in Greek as MHN, “MEN,” which is the root of the verb “to reveal secrets.” It is for this reason that the JEHUDAH of the Hebrew Old Testament becomes JUDE in the Greek New Testament. There is no H in Greek.

Translation: JDOH, the Jaredite spelling of JUDAH.

Explanation: This is different from the Hebrew spelling, יהודה JEHUDAH.

While these characters appear legitimate when taken in isolation of context, the four characters representing Judah occur in inconsistent sequences throughout the tablets. For instance:

This inscription is peculiar in that the foursquare characters are read clockwise from the lower left, to upper left, to upper right, to lower right. I have never heard of any language being written in that sequence. This weighs against the authenticity of the artifact and suggests a modern hoax.

Here we again have the name on the inscription. We also have both the Christian cross and a menorah – an anachronism, as there is no evidence that graphical depictions of the cross were used as symbols of Christianity until several centuries into the Christian era, long after it had become thoroughly divorced from its Jewish roots. If further clues are needed as to the bogus nature of the artifact, the mystic symbol of the Michigan Tablets appears at the top.

Judah - in the context of a Semitic head and a מגן דוד MOGEN DAVID, Shield of David.

I have translated above four characters which I think should be read “Judah.” They were read left to right in fifteen out of sixteen instances. In one single instance the characters were bottom to top in the left column and top to bottom in the right column. In all other cases they were left to right or top to bottom or both. In no case were the characters right to left, which occurs in no Semitic language I can think of at the moment except those written in cuneiform.

I translate the inscription of these four characters

as “Judah” but with a different spelling - more archaic - than what we find in the Masoretic Old Testament.

After this translation, Mr. Burrows send me a picture of a page in a book he had found:

It is the seal at the right that grabs our attention. These are the same four characters we see in many Burrows Cave tablets. The last line on the page reads: “Right: seal impression of jar handle of the same period inscribed YHD, Judah.” While it is no small gratification to have scholars agree with my translation of the same characters on the tablets from the cave, do you see a problem? There are four characters; why are only three translated? Do you see what has been done here? The characters have been read right to left, top to bottom, with the first character being ignored altogether. This is what we should expect if this were Hebrew of the period. It is, in fact, an archaism harking back to the very oldest form of the language - as when we use Old English on a certificate. The four characters should be read not horizontally, but vertically, with the LEFT column first! Then it reads J [or Y if you please] DAH. Judah. But not with the Hebrew spelling or even Hebrew letters. This is the oldest form of the language. This seal is of interest not only in its own right, but also because of the interesting explanation. You would think it would not be too difficult to read three characters in context. But you see that it has been so difficult that scholars have even had to change their views on how they think they should be translated. This also attests to the archaic form of the language used on coins and seals, and the difficulty of translating it.

Mr. Burrow’s knowledge of an ancient Israelite artifact including the same source of the four-letter Judah inscription found on many Burrows Cave tablets does not demonstrate that the BC artifacts are legitimate. To the contrary, it raises the suspicion that this sequence on the Burrows Cave tablets was likely copied, sometimes with sequence error or modification, from a photo of a genuine artifact from ancient Israel.

Photo (c) Russell Burrows. Used with permission.

Now let’s see if we can do anything with this stone engraving that looks like a leaf-bare tree at first glance but is quickly seen to be, apparently, the diagram of a river. The first thing that we see is that if this is supposed to be the Mississippi, it is upside down by Old World standards. All ancient civilizations I know anything about, placed South at the top of their maps. Here the Gulf of Mexico is at the bottom.

Let’s continue with our chart:

Gesenius value

Old Italic value

Etrurian value

Etruscan value

TC value

PSUPC value

Wiki value

TPA value

Hieroglyphic

Hebrew

11H

5Y,J

P,B

1-4D

D,R

Φ)

10K

10TH

1-11H

4-6 KH

1-7,10-11T,

T, V

D,T

T,10

1-2,5,10A

L, t,v

COM

90° c

45°