A Modern Hoax

by David Grant Stewart, Sr. (c) 2007

Here I would like to consider the Michigan tablets from a contextual and linguistic standpoint.

The Michigan tablets convey a conventional but shallow understanding of certain events recorded on Holy Writ. We should expect additional records to provide additional information, but they do not. Not only this, but the information portrayed does not go beyond popular, not scholarly, details.

Here is one which was reproduced both in Henriette Mertz’ book, The Mystic Symbol, and as a negative white on black version, on the last page of The Ancient American, issue number 5 March-April 1994:

Picture courtesy of The Ancient American, which holds the copyrights to both the magazine itself and the Mertz book.

Here we have some scenes representing the early chapters of Genesis.

First let’s take up the pictures, then the text.

The sequence of the pictures may be seen to be like this:

AB

CD

EF.

In the first picture we see angels with wings. We recognize this as a medieval concept, not substantiated anywhere in Holy Writ nor in ancient records.

We see the creation of Adam as a whole man, a notion that is not upheld by Holy Writ nor ancient records nor precedented in any way.

In the second picture, we see Eve being created whole, without any developmental process. We still have not risen above medieval mentality.

We also see Adam standing by watching this strange phenomenon. The record states that he was in a deep sleep. We begin to get the idea that whoever wrote this was illiterate and got his information from a passion play. If this is the case, what does he have to teach us?

In the third frame we have a snake tempting Eve, with Adam as a bystander. The record makes it clear that had Adam been present for the snake oil sales pitch, it would not have been successful.

The record makes it clear that it was not a snake that tempted Eve. It was a serpent, a generic term for all reptiles, but specifies that this reptile had legs. Definitely not a snake. A tyrannosaurus, perhaps, but not a snake. More medieval mindset.

In the next scene we see Adam and Eve being ordered out of the Garden, but the artist forgot, if he ever knew, to clothe them at least with aprons made of fig leaves.

In the penultimate scene we see Cain striking down Abel with a sharp stick. The ancient record says that Cain put poison on the sharp part of a plow and struck Abel down with it. The Egyptian account goes into great detail about Eve finding his dying body, frothing at the mouth from the poison. The Hebrew record mentions the blood spilled on the ground.

Here in this same scene we see the artist has finally gotten around to dignifying Cain and Abel with loincloths. This is a very primitive notion not justified by any of the ancient records but is to be expected of the medieval mind we have seen up to now. We also recognize that medieval minds are by no means confined to antiquity.

In the background of this same frame we see a herd of cattle. The ancient records state that Abel was a sheepherder. Once again, utter ignorance oft the written account, but close enough for an illiterate tradition.

In the final scene we see Abraham with a very small child on an altar with a small bundle of twigs awaiting cremation. There is no justification in the record for supposing that Isaac was a very small child at the time of this incident.

The altar betrays utter ignorance of the ancient records’ descriptions of ancient altars. They were always made of unhewn stone with a trench dug about them representing the Milky Way.

The firewood was always placed between the altar and the victim. The artist does not have a clue how the offering is to be burnt.

The angel is outfitted with wings again, and Abraham wears a crown, neither justified by the written accounts.

Finally, the art work bears no resemblance whatever to any classical, ancient, or ethnic art, but rather a very early effort of a late nineteenth or twentieth century schoolboy aspiring to become a cartoonist.

It is perfectly clear from the illustrations that whoever wrote this tablet has less than nothing to tell us. All of the details are wrong in an incredibly naïve way.

Now the writing. The characters are all facing to the right. In all systems using such hieroglyphs, this denotes that the direction of reading the characters must be from right to left. Yet the pictures are left to right! This sort of inconsistency does not exist in any language in the world.

The “mystic symbol” as Mertz calls it, is in the upper left corner of the text. It is raised above and separated from the body of the text, suggesting it should be read first, yet the text characters denote they should be read right to left. To further confuse matters, the alignment of the text is left, demonstrating that the writer wrote them left to right. This alone suggest that whoever wrote this knew absolutely nothing about ancient languages.

In this text the majority of the characters are what has been called in the literature, “toothbrush characters,” for the obvious reason of their similar appearance. Characters like these exist only in one language, that is, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and they have a few variants, not the several dozen shown here. In Egyptian hieroglyphic, they are used as the determinative for “bone” but here they are grouped together with minor variations which are self discrediting. The repetitive nature of these characters with minor variations calls to mind the mindless repetitions of the Voynich manuscript. Such characters are irrational from a language standpoint. No language on earth has ever used anything remotely like this. This is analogous to the idea of increments or decrements being represented by a picture of a person holding up one, two, or three fingers. No language in the world is so primitive. Numbers are represented in every language in the world either as a group of the very most elementary characters, such as lines or dots, as in Chinese, or by a single symbol for each digit, as in the earliest form of Egyptian and Sanskrit, or by a combination of the two, as in Etruscan and Latin. The “toothbrush characters” are in and of themselves an absurdity.

Several of the Egyptian hieroglyphs in this text are actually upside down!

These same characters are represented differently elsewhere, in other Michigan tablets. This was also the fatal flaw of the BC artifacts. The corpus of the texts is not self consistent!

I submit that the characters as represented at the bottom of this tablet are incapable of conveying rational thought, for the same reason as the words of the Voynich manuscript.

One observation should be made about the “mystic symbol” itself. The cuneiform character on the right does not exist in any cuneiform writing system, nor does the middle character as a stand alone character, but only as part of a larger composite character. 

Altogether, both the pictures and the characters are, both individually and collectively, ignorant and irrational. Either the pictures alone, or the characters alone, would be sufficient to prove this tablet devoid of historical authenticity or intellectual value.

Both the Burrows Cave story and the Michigan tablets have suffered from weak objections. There are few things more damaging to your case than to be represented by incompetent counsel. Non sequitur objections based on metallurgy and artistic precociousness do not cut it. A priori rejection based on lack of harmony with ignorant preconception is worth less than nothing. They only enlist the sympathies of those not shackled by such bias. It is not the precociousness of either the Burrows Cave artifacts nor the Michigan tablets that discredits them. The accounts handed down to us are not helpful because for every accrediting story there is also a discrediting story. It is the stupidity and irrationality of the artifacts themselves that ultimately seal their fate. Even if they were real, the information they convey is worth less than nothing. It is simply not so.

I harbor no malice toward those who have bilked honest investigators out of time and money with their lies and fraud. For my part, I have entered into these investigations with an open mind, and have run the artifacts through the tests that only a translator can subject them to, and they have been found wanting. Mr. Burrows can fade away into the sunset in ignominy, and the LDS Church stands vindicated for having returned the Michigan tablets to the state of Michigan. The story is ended. The case is closed.

Now we will get on with translating ancient records. Real ones that have something to tell us that we do not know.