David Stewart, Jr. and David Stewart, Sr.

Question: What would happen if you dug up an ancient artifact in the Western Hemisphere that suggested a degree of technology greater than that of the American Indian?

Answer: It would be universally denounced as a fraud.

This question is not merely hypothetical: it has played out repeatedly for more than two hundred years.  Tens of thousands of artifacts have been discovered in the Western Hemisphere. Try to find ONE of them that suggests a degree of technology higher than that of the American Indian which has not been pronounced a hoax by all “experts.”  You cannot do it. All such findings are pronounced, a priori, hoaxes, because they fly in the face of the religion of organic evolution.

Henriette Mertz, a patent attorney who was respected for her research on ancient American artifacts and for (among other things) correctly identifying the language on the Bat Creek Inscription after decades of erroneous identification by scholars, recounted the numerous finds of early stones with engravings – and the response of the academic community to such finds:

In the wake of our Revolutionary War, hordes of land-hungry settlers poured across the Alleghenies to establish homes in fertile river valleys along the Ohio, Muskingum and Wabash and soon annihilated that once noble race of red men.  In less than half a century, that free and idyllic life was wiped out and a new era commenced.  As these recently-come farmers began cultivation of their soil, spades and ploughs turned up odd pieces of slate, copper and clay embedded within tree-roots or lying deep in the warm earth.  More intent on cultivation of land than on picking up strange objects, farmers discarded most of this material assuming it to have been Indian and therefore worthless.

A few more knowledgeable amongst them, however, recognized in some of this material an attempt at writing.  What it meant, they could not guess….Specimens of these marked objects eventually found their way into hands of scholarly persons, and farmers, eager to have the inscriptions read, entrusted their finds to members of the academic community who, they felt, would be capable of interpreting or translating this curiously written matter.  It now appears that a gross and serious error was committed by those into whose care these specimens were confided, thus resulting in irreparable loss.  An academic group not recognizing the writing as having been set down in any letters with which they themselves were familiar, to save their self-esteem, charged that it was fraudulent.  They called attention to the writing which bore an unmistakable mixture of cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphic, Phoenician and Greek letters. Without hesitation and needing merely one quick glance, each and every professor agreed that the specimens were rank forgeries.  And on that charge they stood unified and immoveable.

Hundreds of objects – numbering even into thousands – bore inscriptions in some strange writing containing characters which no one who examined them could either read or tell from what language they came.  While the academic world remained inflexible, refusing to move from their position that all these artifacts had been forged, a majority of unconvinced Michigan farmers, in turn, stubbornly refused to believe that anyone had trespassed on their land secreting this array of inexplicable material.  To a farmer, that which he ploughed up was not “planted” on his land at any recent date regardless of whether or not it could be read.  The greater portion of this material (thus and thereby) passed from existence...[1]

During our Colonial days, along the Eastern seaboard of the United States, numerous inscribed rocks bewildered early settlers.  Notable among this material bearing inscriptions was the famous Dighton Rock of Massachusetts…In 1680, a copy was made by Dr. Danforth; Cotton Mather sketched a facsimile in 1712, followed by Dr. Greenword in 1730; ten or more persons published drawings before 1830.  This particular transcription defied reduction and remains an enigma today.[2]

In the interval between 1837 and 1875, scores of other inscribed stones turned up in areas from the Eastern seaboard to as far west as the Mississippi River.  This backwoods region was opened to settlement following the Revolutionary War and farmers moving in from the east, bewildered by the number of inscribed stones uncovered by their ploughs, hopefully turned them over to the academic community trusting that they might learn what people had trod their soils in an earlier age.  Since most of these marked stones bore letters unfamiliar to those who examined them, charges of forgery instantly arose pointing a finger at the farmer who had ploughed them up.  Of the scores of such pieces recovered, no single piece was at any time held to be authentic – all were charged as forgeries.  A so-called “policy” was thus established classifying any and all inscribed material as fraudulent – dismissing it without further study.[3]

Well-known in the archeological field, but practically unknown to a major portion of persons in the United States, inscribed stones found here include the Kensington Stone of Minnesota and the Havener stone of Arkansas, the inscribed copper [actually gold] plates found by Joseph Smith in Palmyra, New York; the so-called “iron stones” said to be in Phoenician letters found near Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania; the Grave Creek stone of West Virginia; the “Holy Stone” said to be in Hebrew found in Ohio; the stone found in a mound in Loudan County, Tennessee in Phoenician characters; and the many hundreds of inscribed artifacts of stone, copper and slate from Michigan.[4]

The reader might consider how this policy of classifying “any and all inscribed material as fraudulent” without study compares to the scientific method.  The impact of this policy are felt to this day: Mr. Burrows, discoverer of the Burrows Cave, recounts in his book his astonishment at being told by an “expert” at Eastern Illinois University that ancient inscribed stones he had discovered in a cave were forgeries planted by a nineteenth-century cult.  The “expert” made her definitive determination over the telephone without having examined the artifacts or even having seen photographs!

Mertz documents the persecution that those who reported finding such relics were subjected to:

Dr. Bradner’s honesty and integrity was subjected to an endless flow of castigation sharply administered by the academic community of the United States.  The academic world here had its own answer: the stone was not authentic but an out and out fraud and Mr. Johnson, a banker, like Dr. Bradner, having only the highest reputation, still was charged with being guilty of forging the inscription.  With not one iota of evidence to support such a pronouncement, unknown to himself, Mr. Johnson was tried in academic journals, found guilty and this stone stands today a forgery – with the museum where it is housed refusing to furnish a photograph to this author for publication here that anyone might examine it for himself.  Other inscribed stones from the same area met with the same fate – the “Cincinnati stone” reported in the Cincinnati Gazette of 24 December 1842, found within an ancient mound, 20 feet high, upon removal, hieroglyphics of an undecipherable nature were found upon its upper face.  One stone after another, found in this general area, inscribed in letters unrecognized, provoked the ire of the academic community who ordered each one destroyed as it appeared.  How many unrecorded inscribed stones that failed to find their way into the literature will never be known.  Anyone who has followed the unrelenting tribulations heaped upon Hjalmar Holand over some forty years in his valiant efforts to have the Kensington stone accepted, will have little difficulty in appreciating the situation.  The shocking end result has completely distorted history of our country merely to save face and uphold an ipse dixit pronouncement laid down many years ago by an academic group intrusted by the public with preservation of these matters.[5]

Lack of examination of artifacts did not stop “experts” from rendering definitive opinion on the Michigan relics:

In rendering an expert opinion, a leading anthropologist, Prof. Morris Jastrow, of the University of Pennsylvania, declined to view the actual specimens since a photograph appeared to him sufficient saying: “In view of the wide publicity given to the report of the discovery of ‘Assyrian’ antiquities in a Michigan mound, I beg you to announce that the tablets and monuments claimed to have been excavated are willful forgeries remarkable only for their clumsy character and the great ignorance of the forger.  Photographs of the objects have been sent to me and a glance is sufficient to reveal the true character of the find.  The inscriptions are largely a horrible mixure [sic] of Phoenician, Egyptian and ancient Greek characters taken at random from a comparative table of alphabets such as is found at the back of Webster’s dictionary.  As for the cuneiform characters found on the tablets, they are in the main, variations of a single letter which the forger happened to stumble across perhaps in the article ‘Cuneiform’ of Appleton’s Encyclopedia…”  This opinion of Prof. Jastrow accepted as “expert” by others, colored statements of all others that followed.  “Fraud” said Prof. Dorsey – “Humbug of the first water” asserted Prof. Emerson.  Newspapers, as well as the academic community, thrive on scandal such as this and Detroit papers particularly let no opportunity slip by in order to keep the controversy geared to fever pitch.[6]

Such episodes were not anomalies, but part of a systematic pattern of anthropologists and archaeologists to discredit such finds. Emeritus Professor James Schertz of the University of Wisconsin documented the tactics of archaeologists and other academics to dismiss any artifacts or finds not in harmony with their consensus decrees, noting that they even formed a syndicate to destroy artifacts they deemed anomalous:

In the 1800s, academic authorities and archaeologists in North America seem to have agreed on a policy not to allow people from Europe to this land, especially by boat, before our hero Christopher Columbus.  This can be likened to the so-called Monroe Doctrine, which states that America is for the Americans, and European influence will not be allowed.  This policy can be traced to Major Powell, a former civil war officer, hired by the Smithsonian Institute to study Indians and Indian mounds and settle once and for all the question of the origin of the mound builders of the New World.  We might question Powell’s scholarship, but he was extremely effective in putting an end to the mound builder controversy that was then creating such excitement in the land.  His politically acceptable solution was that there had not been major influence from the Old World on the mound builders, even his archaeologists found the Bat Creek Stone in an Indian mound that had obvious Phoenician based letters on it.  Powell’s people dismissed this stone as merely having letters similar to those of the Cherokee alphabet, which had been used to print newspapers for the Cherokee tribe, before their forced move west of the Mississippi, over the infamous Trail of Tears.  A fair analysis of this important piece of reliable basic data (the Bat Creek Stone) would lead the thinking scholar to a conclusion quite different than the strong emotional beliefs which originate from Powell’s work. After Powell published his conclusions, the American army which was still fighting the Indian Wars, continued driving the natives from their land without guilt they might feel if they though themselves somehow related to the refugees.  The Indian Wars were fought, and their land was essentially all taken.  But the influence of Powell is with us still in our universities, public institutions, libraries and book stores…Between the days of Major Powell and today, thousands of inscribed rocks with obvious Old World script and art on them…have been dismissed as obvious fakes without anything that would approach a fair analysis or real proof of forgery.[7]

In recent years, there has been greater examination of at least some artifacts by members of the academic community.  But after nearly a century and a half of the “Powell doctrine” of dogma over objectivity, relatively few scholars are willing to break the moratorium and express even a tepid opinion that even some artifacts could be genuine.

Determining Authenticity vs. Forgery

Mertz documents the poor record of archaeologists in determining which items are authentic and which are fraudulent:

All substances or writings alleged by “experts” to be fraudulent or forged, are not in fact fraudulent or forged.  Sometimes a pendulum swings both ways – writings alleged to be forged turn out to be authentic while that accepted as authentic is later found fraudulent.  The famous “Cardiff Giant” earned a small fortune before tests proved it to be gypsum; the equally famous ‘Piltdown man” long hailed by top echelon anthropologists as the “missing link” was exposed by a hoax – and surprisingly enough one committed by a member of their own profession! Tablets known as the Tel el Amarna tablets, recovered from a Nilotic site – held by every outstanding museum director and archaeologist in both Europe and America, to be rank forgeries – are now recognized as priceless diplomatic correspondence dating from about 1500 B.C.; lid of an Egyptian sarcophagus resting in one of our better known museums – authenticated and dated by experts at 300 B.C. – registered a date of less than a century when subjected to carbon-14 tests; the Dead Sea Scrolls, authenticity of which had been roundly denounced for seven long years by archeologists – and when offered the originals for a pittance of their present value, Yale experts said “No thank you, we have photographs” – had their early date confirmed when carbon-14 tests of linen wrapping gave readings placing beyond all doubt that these hidden records had actually been written 2,000 and more years ago.  These samples typify “expert” opinion – opinion such as that confronting the Michigan artifacts.

Before 1950, opinions biased or bigoted, stood without challenge – no one dared to challenge Prof. Jastrow.  Today, the situation with reference to dating has taken a right-about face due to Dr. Willard Libby’s invention of a nuclear time-clock – carbon-14 dating which has completely outmoded the dogmatic ipsi dixit former method.  In addition to dating, analytical methods of detecting forged handwriting now also exist. [8]

Mertz notes that in modern times, archaeologists and paleographers have continued to irresponsibly label writings unfamiliar to them as forgeries even when they lack adequate information to make a meaningful determination:

Four or five characters taken from the body of one inscription of those which are here discussed [Michigan inscriptions] had been sent to professional paleographers and archaeologists, here and abroad, familiar with ancient writing, hoping that some one of them might offer a suggestion by which this material could be reduced and eventually translated.  Each reply brought forth the same answer – the writing was forged.  It might be pointed out once more that given four or five isolated letters with no known specimen for comparison, forgery per se, could not be determined under any presently known circumstance.  Forgery relates to wrong origin, not contents.  All that any member of this group rightly could have replied was that the characters were not known to them and did not appear in any of the ancient alphabets with which they were familiar.  Any direct charge of forgery lay beyond their power – yet each reply stated that the writing was forged and not one left any possibility for it to be otherwise.  Analysis, such as would be acceptable in any recognized Court, showed that this writing had not been forged.  Each tablet had been written by a different hand – no two tablets bore characteristics stemming from one single hand.  Each tablet had been written by a different hand – no two tablets bore characteristics stemming from one single hand.  Each tablet must then be what it purported to be on its face – and with hundreds, even thousands, of different hands employed in its writing, forgery is by no means established.  No single plate was found with writing that duplicated writing on any other plate.  Insofar as the academic community was concerned – not one single person acknowledged that he himself did not know.  Is this how history is written?[9]

Blunders of American Archaeology

The past two centuries of American archaeology have been infested by catastrophic blunders:

1. Rejecting, a priori, any artifact that shows art, technology, or metallurgy beyond the level of the American Indian as a hoax – notwithstanding, for instance, the known existence of the ancient copper mines in Michigan demanding advanced metallurgical skills.

2. Rejecting, a priori, any artifact that shows any Old World influence as a hoax.

3. Rejecting, a priori, any artifact that shows any deviation from Old World cultures as a clumsy fraud for its lack of strict adherence to Old World standards.

4. Assuming, de facto, that any artifact which shows any Old World influence to be proof of diffusionist theories, i.e., that the article itself came from the Old World rather than the more rational assumption that it was made by people who came from the Old World.

5. Rejecting, a priori, any writing system found in the Americas which we can not read. This sets a new height for arrogance. I have already demonstrated many times over in other articles that there is not a scholar in the world who even reads Old World Egyptian Hieroglyphic, Hieratic, or Old Sumerian Cuneiform correctly. How in the world can they expect to read the culturally modified New World equivalents correctly, which present a much greater challenge?

Is there anything scientific or even honest about rejecting any datum point that appears to disagree with your theory?  What kind of a grade would one get in laboratory class with such a priori reasoning: “this datum point disagrees with my theory, therefore it is not valid?”

One book reviewer eloquently described the phenomenon of a priori rejection of data points out of harmony with a predetermined scientific orthodoxy. He applauded the documentation of:

“a disturbing phenomenon that has increasingly crippled mainstream science: the establishment of a new scientific orthodoxy, i.e. a quasi-religious belief by leading scientists in the absolute and unquestionable validity of the basic theories of their field. These theories are then elevated to ‘facts’ of which any dissenter is accused of being ignorant, which makes for a convenient, easy dismissal of any anomalous evidence. Since any such evidence is thus automatically ineligible for publication in the proper journals, this lack of documentation is then in turn taken by researchers in the field as proof that the evidence must be of low scientific value."[10]

This game of refusing to consider or publish inconvenient data – and then claiming that those who disagree with their dictates are ignorant or dishonest – is tiring. 

What is perhaps even more concerning is the systematic and wholesale destruction of priceless ancient North American relics by establishment archaeologists and academics who are trusted as objective and impartial arbiters of truth and on whom the public has relied for the preservation of ancient sites.

Mound and Artifact Destruction

Henriette Mertz documented systematic destruction of countless ancient sites in North America, which carbon dating has placed as at least 2000-3000 years old:

Questioning now whether or not this astronomical number of person might once have inhabited the Kentucky-Tennessee region, since we know nothing of them, one has only to turn to official Smithsonian reports of both Thomas and Webb.  Wanton destruction of mounds and villages that followed in the wake of the Thomas Archaeological Expedition sent out by the Smithsonian, is nowhere better noted than by Webb when he rendered his report to the Smithsonian some forty years later on his Archaeological Survey of the Norris Basin in Tennessee.  Web’s notations give one considerable pause for he found village site after village site reduced, plundered and then left to the elements to obliterate – precluding any further study.  Thomas, who presumably professionally investigated the entire mound-building region from the Mississippi to the Appalachian Range and from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes on behalf of Smithsonian Institution, dug into every mound on his path destroying that in which he himself had no personal interest – thus wiping out forever invaluable and irreplaceable historical records.  Major Webb, excavating a very limited section on the Clinch River, just before complete flooding of the Norris Basin, wiping out any shred of remainder, stated in his report that within a short distance of a few miles along the Clinch, countless village sites, one after another, could be observed but he had no time to investigate – a complete examination or even survey was impossible at that time – a matter of too little and too late.  It must be remembered that Webb’s report confined itself to a most restricted area through which a tributary flowed – noting meanwhile that village sites abounded on every other tributary branching off from the Tennessee.  Report of the Pickwick Basin Survey confirmed an identical pattern – hundreds of ancient village sites – no time even to look before flooding.  How many thousand such sites – no one has the slightest conception.

All survey groups on behalf of the government projects used W.P.A. labor, for time of construction of the dam took place during the “depression” in 1933-1934, and archaeologists in charge were of the opinion that it would be preferable to employ totally inexperienced common laborer rather than to have these men on relief expend their time in so-called “leaf-raking.” So it happened that this unbelievably rich territory, known by professional archaeologists to have been prehistoric, known to have supported thousands of ancient village sites stretched along banks of countless tributaries throughout eastern Tennessee and Kentucky, in one short year was wiped clean of any remaining vestige left by the earlier Thomas destruction, and thus irreplaceable contemporary evidence of prehistoric records extending back more than 2000 years, went down the drain without so much as a casual regret by a group trusted to preserve this material on behalf of the civilized world. The region lies under water today – a drowned monument to any future archaeological research – while at the same time Abu Simbel glistens under the Nile sun.[11]

One of the more intriguing off-shoots of mound destruction raises the question as to what might have been found inside – if anything.  In an area near Newark, on the Licking branch of the Muskingum, a mound produced two most unusual inscribed tablets, both small, which still exist today but about which nothing can be learned from those in whose charge they rest.  A contemporary record, written at the time they were found by a medical doctor, can be read in the early records of the International Congress of Americanists, published in France...where it is necessary to turn for information about these two stones.[12]

Whatever one’s personal beliefs, in no case can the destruction of artifacts and archaeological sites be justified.  Such cultural crimes deprive others of the opportunity to review the material for themselves and draw their own conclusions.  Why would true scholars feel so threatened by mere forgeries that they would systematically round them up and destroy them?  If in fact their objections were valid, why are they not secure with merely presenting their logic to the public rather than taking the time and expense to acquire and destroy large numbers of artifacts?

If the archaeological community was truly dedicated to comprehensive and impartial study of the past, then one would expect to see enthusiasm for the study and preservation of all genuine artifacts of the same fervor as seen against those considered suspect. Even a five or ten percent chance of destroying an irreplaceable genuine artifact should be deemed completely unacceptable, and so even the possibility that an artifact called into question could be genuine should always lead to its preservation.  Given the dismal record of archaeologists, who have been duped by blatant hoaxes such as the Piltdown Man while misidentifying numerous genuine finds as hoaxes as Mertz documents, do archaeologists not have an intellectual and ethical responsibility to speak reservedly, to consider the possibility that their current conclusions may be wrong, and to preserve artifacts of disputed authenticity for future study?

Unfortunately, that is not what has occurred: such artifacts have been systematically destroyed or pigeon-holed, usually without serious study, while accusations of fraud and forgery have been tossed about indiscriminately.  The acceptance or rejection of North American archeological finds has typically depended more on the acceptability of the conclusions than the quality of the data.

The reckless and wanton destruction of known prehistoric sites by trusted members of the archaeological community met with no objection or outcry from other scholars that should inevitably accompany the loss of priceless cultural heritage.  The silence that met the destruction of countless known prehistoric sites along the Mississippi River Valley and other areas contrasts sharply with the firestorm of criticism raised over Burrow’s Cave, the Michigan tablets, and countless other finds, and leaves no doubt that consensus academia has been more interested in protecting its own theories than in discovering the true history of early Americans.

Quantity of North American Inscriptions

To appreciate the true magnitude of the finds of thousands of engraved stones North America, we need other ancient languages to provide a frame of reference.  Firmly established ancient languages including early Greek and early Etruscan have relatively few known inscriptions. Larissa Bonfante wrote:

“There are, to date, seventy-five known Etruscan inscriptions from the seventh century BCE, a very respectable quantity when compared with Greek inscriptions from this period.”[13]

By conservative counts, over 10,000 rocks and tablets with writing on them have been found throughout the central and eastern United States.   Only a small fraction remain.  If only 75 inscriptions in early Etruscan are known to exist – and this quantity is considered “very respectable” when compared with early Greek inscriptions – what can we conclude of the adequacy of tens of thousands of inscriptions in North America?  Given the small number of known inscriptions in many early languages, what are the irreplaceable losses occurred when thousands of North American inscriptions were destroyed?  When a great many priceless ancient North American sites have been wantonly destroyed by archaeologists seeking to eliminate competition to their own theories, can there be any validity to their contentions that existing North American inscriptions are too sparse to establish a valid language?

The vast quantity of inscriptions can also provide a sanity check for claims that North American inscriptions were forged.  Are we to believe that all such findings – sharing remarkable commonalities from sites hundreds of miles apart and found over the course of some two hundred years – are rank forgeries?  How many finds must be made independently across the country before one considers that they may not be forgeries?  How many forgeries of early Etruscan, Greek, and Phoenician have been presented, compared to the many thousands claimed for North American relics?  Was there a massive conspiracy on the part of the American public, Even if some forgeries could definitively be identified, does that preclude all other finds from being authentic?

Linguistic Considerations in Early American Inscriptions

Mertz observes that while critics have attempted to discredit thousands of artifacts found in North America, they have failed to adequately consider linguistic issues:

Unrecognized letters frequently crop up in isolated areas round the globe.  When such extraneous characters have appeared in the United States, in regions where they were unexpected, the immediate reaction of those presumed appointed “experts” who examined them was to jump to the conclusion that they had been forged.  To explain who forged them and why presents a greater mystery than the artifacts themselves...[14]

Suppose for a moment that these engraved characters had in fact been copied from a table of comparative letters taken from Webster’s dictionary or Appleton’s Encyclopedia, as Prof. Jastrow assures us.  Did Prof. Jastrow explain how one could form a word or a sentence, given such a table of letters, if he lacked knowledge of the language? Could a house-painter such as James Scotford, with little formal education, be presumed to assemble strange characters from a table in order to write words and sentences correctly in Greek, Phoenician or Egyptian?  To be able to inscribe this material would not such acumen be a prerequisite?  Were the inscriptions “horrible mixtures?”…The academic world so charged and would have us so believe.[15]

Many ancient forms of writing are known to exist but have not as yet been reduced. During one period of time, each city-state in Greece worked out a system of its own – some of which remain unread. If all inscriptions had been set down bilingually, comparable to that on the Rosetta stone, problems would rarely arise. Without such guidance a step by step trial and error procedure inevitably confronts any person undertaking cryptanalysis for he knows that sooner or later a refining process must take place. Tablet inscriptions, like the Maya glyph or Inca quipu, remain undeciphered.  Yet all characters were of uniform style in that like characters repeated themselves on tablets whether recovered near Wyman or 150 miles away in the Detroit region.  Whosoever did the inscribing, whether one person or many, followed an established pattern indicating a common language familiar to a group communicating with each other by written word understood over a widely extending area.[16]

As noted by Prof. Jastrow letters were a “horrible mixture” of ancient Greek, Phoenician, cuneiform or Egyptian hieroglyph.  Yet Coptic had its origin in similar fashion – fusion of Egyptian with later Greek.  Few early writings were pure anything – for all people borrowed from one another by way of commercial intercourse depending on mutual convenience and understanding. Insofar as mixtures of letters and words are concerned, English itself presents an excellent example—everyday words as kindergarten borrowed from the German; garage from French; smorgasbord from Swedish; pronto, fiesta and siesta from Spanish.  Why then should a mixture of Phoenician, Greek, cuneiform, or hieroglyph provoke sarcasm?  Various tablets written in ancient Semitic manner from right to left, commingled with inscriptions written boustrophedon-wise – that is the first line read from right to left, the second from left to right, the third from right to left and so on.  Boustrophedon means “as the ox plows” – up one line and down the next.  Boustrophedon writing is characteristic of Eastern Mediterranean countries from earliest times – and one writing Phoenician letters might well have been expected to have written in boustrophedon manner.[17]

The Need for Linguistic Examination of Relics

Mertz, speaking from her personal experience in correctly deciphering inscriptions that had eluded establishment scholars for decades, observed that in the heated debate over the authenticity of the various relics, there had been little if any real attempt to examine them on their linguistic merits:

Each and every artifact unearthed from these Michigan mounds bore some type of writing – Greek, Egyptian, Phoenician or Sumerian as observed by Prof. Morris Jastrow.  Could this writing not then have been deciphered as was the Rosetta Stone or Cretan Linear B?  Apparently no Champollion nor Ventris fired by burning curiousity arose.  Records fail to reveal serious study of the writing, yet many outstanding philologists or faculty members acquainted with these artifacts and well-versed in ancient languages, particularly Greek, either apathetic or lacking an inquisitive mind, displayed no interest in decipherment – even granting the material to be fraudulent.  In no instance, other than Prof. Russell’s article, has the record disclosed objective scholarly study of the objects or the writing for what it might be worth – good or bad.[18]

I (David Stewart, Sr.) am just a translator, but I am a translator. All my professional life I have had to be not just right, but exactly right. Patent attorneys have depended upon me to make their case. Research laboratories have depended upon me to translate laboratory reports exactly right. International corporations have depended upon me to translate contracts exactly correctly. Major entities in academia, government, and industry have depended upon my translations. Agencies have selected me as the one translator they could trust to translate correctly the communications between heads of state for diplomatic and defense operations. I will translate the Burrows records and other items to the best of my ability and let people judge for themselves. I am not an antiquarian nor a mind reader. I can be deceived as to the thoughts and intents of individuals. But I will do my best to provide accurate translations. This has been my life’s work and still is.

I will show you everything involved in the process of translation and you can judge for yourself whether it is correct or not. The facts and logic will be put on the table for you to consider for yourself. If you do your own thinking, I believe you will find considerable value in this analysis.  If, on the other hand, you can be dissuaded by the mere sneer of some academician who has never had any responsible body depend upon the accuracy of his translations, there is little hope that any data or analysis I can provide will be of use to you.