David Grant Stewart, Sr.

A reader sent me this rock from Wisconsin for analysis.

Photo courtesy of Wayne May, Ancient American magazine.

This stone is a recent fake, discerned by the following reasons.

Since cuneiform is generally written on clay tablets, every language that uses any form of cuneiform script follows very precise rules, none of which this text conforms to.

This rock has characters which are upside down. No cuneiform character is ever written upside down.

There are several ways of writing cuneiform strokes according to the medium. Different forms of the same stroke are never used in the same document. This rock uses different forms of the same stroke.

Although this rock, by chance, has half a dozen groupings of strokes which occur in Assyrian cuneiform, none of the other groupings of characters occur in Assyrian or any other language.

In cuneiform, it is vitally important to keep every character distinct from the one below it or above it. This is so important that clay tablets are usually written between pre-marked horizontal lines. On this rock the lines are not only not straight, but the characters and strokes are so crowded that it is impossible to distinguish which characters are to be associated with which other characters above or below. No actual cuneiform text has ever been written remotely like this one.

In cuneiform, it is vitally important to keep every character distinct from the ones on either side of it. The reason for this is that since every stroke modifies the meaning of its associated character, it is always critically important to make its association with its character unambiguous. In this rock the strokes are a continuous mass, which is never done in any language using any form of cuneiform. This point is so important that while all other writing systems in the world ran all characters together, Persian cuneiform was the first language in the world to insert marks between each character so that the grouping of strokes could be distinguished unambiguously, no matter now sloppy the scribe may have been.

No cuneiform text ever writes any character or stroke backwards. This rock has many backwards strokes.

This rock is obviously the work of an individual who did not have the faintest familiarity with any form of cuneiform script.

There is not the slightest possibility whatever that the writings on this rock represent any language of the past.

I have deliberately chosen not to illustrate all of the countless defects which prove this rock to be a phony so that any would-be prankster may not gain any information to improve the quality of his fakes.