SHEPPARD AND PATRICK: The Los Lunas Decalogue Stone

West of Los Lunas, New Mexico. Near the river and old settlement of Rio Puerco

The official story

The Los Lunas Decalogue Stone is a large boulder on the side of Hidden Mountain, near Los Lunas, New Mexico, about 35 miles (56 km) south of Albuquerque, that bears a very regular inscription carved into a flat panel. The stone is also known as the Los Lunas Mystery Stone or Commandment Rock. The inscription is interpreted to be an abridged version of the Decalogue or Ten Commandments in a form of Paleo-Hebrew. A letter group resembling the tetragrammaton YHWH, or "Yahweh," makes three appearances. The stone is controversial in that some claim the inscription is Pre-Columbian, and therefore proof of early Semitic contact with the Americas.

History

The first recorded mention of the stone is in 1933, when the late professor Frank Hibben (1910-2002), an archaeologist from the University of New Mexico, saw it. According to a 1996 interview, Hibben was "convinced the inscription is ancient and thus authentic. He reported that he first saw the text in 1933. At the time it was covered with lichen and patination and was hardly visible. He was taken to the site by a guide who had seen it as a boy, back in the 1880s." However, Hibben's testimony is tainted by charges that in at least two separate incidents, he fabricated some or all of his archaeological data to support his pre-Clovis migration theory.

The reported 1880s date of discovery is important to those who believe that the stone is pre-Columbian. However, the Paleo-Hebrew script, which is closely related to the Phoenician script, was well known by at least 1870, thus not precluding the possibility of a modern hoax.

Because of the stone's weight of over 80 tons, it was never moved to a museum or laboratory for study and safekeeping. Many visitors have cleaned the stone inscriptions over the years, likely destroying any possibility for scientific analysis of the inscriptions' patina. Nevertheless, comparing it to a modern inscription nearby, geologist George E. Morehouse, a colleague of Barry Fell, estimated that the inscription could be between 500 and 2000 years old and explaining its freshness and lack of patina as being due to frequent scrubbing to make it more visible.

In April 2006, the first line of the unprotected inscription was obliterated by vandals.

Visitors to the site are required to purchase a $25 Recreational Access Permit from the New Mexico State Land Office.

Controversy

Modern Samaritan mezuzah over doorway. Kiryat Luza, Mount Gerizim.

Archaeolinguist Cyrus Gordon has proposed that the Los Lunas Decalogue is a Samaritan mezuzah. The familiar Jewish mezuzah is a tiny scroll placed in a small container mounted by the entrance to a house. The ancient Samaritan mezuzah, on the other hand, was commonly a large stone slab placed by the gateway to a property or synagogue, and bearing an abridged version of the Decalogue. On historical and epigraphic grounds, Gordon regards the Byzantine period as the most likely for the inscription. The Samaritan alphabet is a direct descendant of the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet.

One argument against the stone's antiquity is its apparent use of modern Hebrew (or otherwise atypical) punctuation, though amateur epigrapher Barry Fell argued that the punctuation is consistent with antiquity. Other researchers dismiss the inscription based on the numerous stylistic and grammatical errors that appear in the inscription.

According to archaeologist Kenneth Feder, "the stone is almost certainly a fake." He points out that "the flat face of the stone shows a very sharp, crisp inscription..." His main concern however is the lack of any archaeological context. He argues that to get to the location of the stone would have required whoever inscribed it to have "stopped along the way, encamped, eaten food, broken things, disposed of trash, performed rituals, and so on. And those actions should have left a trail of physical archaeological evidence across the greater American Southwest, discovery of which would undeniably prove the existence of foreigners in New Mexico in antiquity with a demonstrably ancient Hebrew material culture..." and states that "There are no pre-Columbian ancient Hebrew settlements, no sites containing the everyday detritus of a band of ancient Hebrews, nothing that even a cursory knowledge of how the archaeological record forms would demand there would be. From an archaeological standpoint, that's plainly impossible."

Similar landmarks

The Los Lunas Decalogue Stone is often grouped with the Kensington Runestone, Dighton Rock, and the Newport Tower as examples of American landmarks with disputed provenances. Other disputed American Hebrew inscriptions include the Smithsonian Institution's Bat Creek Inscription and the Newark Ohio Decalogue Stone, Keystone, and Johnson-Bradner Stone.

The correct History of the area says something more about the location of the stone.

Francisco Vázquez de Coronado went to New Spain (present-day Mexico) in 1535 at about age 25, in the entourage of its first Viceroy, Antonio de Mendoza, the son of his father's patron and Coronado's personal friend. In New Spain, he married twelve-year-old Beatriz de Estrada, called "the Saint" (la Santa), sister of Leonor de Estrada, ancestor of the de Alvarado family and daughter of Treasurer and Governor Alonso de Estrada y Hidalgo, Lord of Picón, and wife Marina Flores Gutiérrez de la Caballería, from a converso Jewish family. Coronado inherited a large portion of a Mexican encomendero estate through Beatriz and had eight children by her.

note "converso Jewish"; Jewish who converted to Catholicism......since the inscription on the stone is partially Hebrew this is a clue.

"Eidsmoe cited other explanations include that it was chiseled by “Native Americans of Hebrew origin” or it was made as a prank to play a joke on some professor. The oral statements that the carvings existed as early as 1800 tend to minimize the contemporary joke option, and the age is hard to determine exactly because the stone has been marked with graffiti and cleaned, since it is open to the public and not protected.

Eidsmoe then suggested an alternative to hoax or ancient writing: the possibility of the presence of those with a biblical faith in southwestern North America in the 1500s or 1600s.

He explained how when King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella freed Spain from Muslim domination they decreed Jews in Spain must either become Christian or leave. Many stayed and converted, “at least externally.” They were called conversos.

Some of those then came with the conquistadors to the Western Hemisphere and settled in New Mexico, which to this day remains thick with the evidence of Spanish presence.

“I suggest that sometime in the 1500s, 1600s, or thereafter, to honor the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, a Jewish converso carved the Ten Commandments … to memorialize the covenant his people had made with Jehovah in the days of Moses,” Eidsmoe said.

“This would explain the aging of the inscription and its presence … It could also explain why the maker of the inscription, who may have known Hebrew only as a second language, would have aligned the characters at the bottom as would have been done in English … would have used spacing and punctuation and might have shaped some letters more like the Greek alphabet."

source http://www.wnd.com/2010/03/129385/#Shj3mehyZsyCl280.99

Spain originally governed the territory of New Mexico from 1540 to 1821, then from 1821 to 1845 under the Mexican flag. Before the thirteen original (American) colonies signed the declaration of independence in 1776, people born in the Belen colony were already thirty-six years old. By the time of the American conquest in 1848, several generations of Belenites had been established during the interim hundred years. The ranching and cowboy culture was originally brought to what is modern day United States of America by the Spanish colony established by Don Juan de Onate and 560 original colonists in the year 1598, almost a decade before the establishment of Jamestown, Virginia, and almost a quarter century before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts. The American West was indeed born in New Mexico, including Valencia County, the heart, the nativity of New Mexico. The first ranches and cowboy culture evolved right here along the Rio Grande River over a period of over four hundred years. As the descendents of the Onate colonization in El Rio Arriba, (upper river valley), gained ownership of northern New Mexico lands, new generations of Spanish settlers gradually moved south in search of new cultivatable farmland. By 1740, the movement reached El Rio Abajo, (Lower River valley). A group of citizens from Alburquerque, which was founded in 1706, was looking south to improve their lot. The original Belen Land Grant consisted of approximately 200,000 acres extending from the Rio Puerco on the west to the Manzano Mountains on the east, and from the north from the Tome Land Grant and Los Chavez, to the south by the town of Bernardo. To Indian crops like corn, beans, squash, pumpkins, chili, and melons, the Belen colonists added crops such as oats, wheat, and all kinds of fruit trees as well as European livestock such as sheep, horses, cattle, goats, chickens, and pigs. These first settlers built adobe homes with hornos to make bread, which required the use of Spanish yeast. Some of these Spanish settlers continued developing the cowboy, (vaqueros), and ranching industry while others specialized in grand farms. The Belen

land was fertile and despite regular attacks from wild Apache and Comanche Indians, the colony thrived and grew. Working together with the Pueblo Indians the two groups of people formed a strong military and religious alliance while learning and borrowing from each other, forever changing their respective cultures and that of the American Southwest. In 1750, a military garrison was established in Belen for the protection of the missions and the haciendas scattered along the lower river valley. Ten years later, it was developed into a presidio and Belen became an armed protector against Indian marauders for 150 years to come. By 1790, the colonists of the Belen Land Grant had established six semi-military posts with a Commandate in charge of each Plaza.

Spanish Attempt to Christianize the Pueblo Indians "The American Spanish Inquisition”

For more than 100 years beginning in 1540, the Pueblo Indians of present-day New Mexico were subjected to successive waves of soldiers, missionaries, and settlers. These encounters, referred to as the Entradas, were characterized by violent confrontations between Spanish colonists and Pueblo peoples. The Tiguex War, fought in the winter of 1540–41 by the expedition of Francisco Vásquez de Coronado against the twelve or thirteen pueblos of Tiwa Indians, was particularly destructive to Pueblo and Spanish relations.

In 1598 Juan de Oñate led 129 soldiers and 10 Franciscan Catholic priests plus a large number of women, children, servants, slaves, and livestock into the Rio Grande valley of New Mexico. There were at the time approximately 40,000 Pueblo Indians inhabiting the region. Oñate put down a revolt at Acoma Pueblo by killing and enslaving hundreds of the Indians and sentencing 24 men to have their right foot cut off. The Acoma Massacre would instill fear of the Spanish in the region for years to come, though Franciscan missionaries were assigned to several of the Pueblo towns to Christianize the natives.

The location of the Pueblo villages and their neighbors in early New Mexico.

Spanish colonial policies in the 1500s regarding the humane treatment of Indians were difficult to enforce on the northern frontier. With the establishment of the first permanent colonial settlement in 1598, the Pueblos were forced to provide tribute to the colonists in the form of labor, ground corn and textiles. Encomiendas were soon established by colonists along the Rio Grande, restricting Pueblo access to fertile farmlands and water supplies and placing a heavy burden upon Pueblo labor.[3] Especially egregious to the Pueblo was the assault on their traditional religion. Franciscan priests established theocracies in many of the Pueblo villages. The priests converted the Pueblos to build the Spanish empire in New Mexico. In 1608, it looked as though Spain might abandon the province, the Franciscans baptized seven thousand Pueblos to try to convince the Crown otherwise. Although the Franciscans initially tolerated manifestations of the old religion as long as the Puebloans attended mass and maintained a public veneer of Catholicism, Fray Alonso de Posada (in New Mexico 1656–1665) outlawed Kachina dances by the Pueblo Indians and ordered the missionaries to seize and burn their masks, prayer stick, and effigies. The Franciscan missionaries also forbade the use of entheogenic drugs in the traditional religious ceremonies of the Pueblo. Several Spanish officials, such as Nicolas de Aguilar, who attempted to curb the power of the Franciscans were charged with heresy and tried before the Inquisition.

In the 1670s drought swept the region, causing a famine among the Pueblo and increased raids by the Apache which Spanish and Pueblo soldiers were unable to prevent. Fray Alonso de Benavides wrote multiple letters to the King, describing the conditions, noting "the Spanish inhabitants and Indians alike to eat hides and straps of carts". The unrest among the Pueblos came to a head in 1675. Governor Juan Francisco Treviño ordered the arrest of forty-seven Pueblo medicine men and accused them of practicing "sorcery". Four medicine men were sentenced to death by hanging; three of those sentences were carried out, while the fourth prisoner committed suicide. The remaining men were publicly whipped and sentenced to prison. When this news reached the Pueblo leaders, they moved in force to Santa Fe, where the prisoners were held. Because a large number of Spanish soldiers were away fighting the Apache, Governor Treviño was forced to accede to the Pueblo demand for the release of the prisoners. Among those released was a San Juan ("Ohkay Owingeh" in the Tewa Language) Indian named "Popé".

Rebellion

Following his release, Popé, along with a number of other Pueblo leaders (see list below), planned and orchestrated the Pueblo Revolt. Popé took up residence in Taos Pueblo far from the capital of Santa Fe and spent the next five years seeking support for a revolt among the 46 Pueblo towns. He gained the support of the Northern Tiwa, Tewa, Towa, Tano, and Keres-speaking Pueblos of the Rio Grande Valley. The Pecos Pueblo, 50 miles east of the Rio Grande pledged its participation in the revolt as did the Zuni and Hopi, 120 and 200 miles respectively west of the Rio Grande. The Pueblos not joining the revolt were the four southern Tiwa (Tiguex) towns near Santa Fe and the Piro Pueblos south of the principal Pueblo population centers near the present day city of Socorro. The southern Tiwa and the Piro were more thoroughly integrated into Spanish culture than the other groups. The Spanish population of about 2,400, including mixed-blood mestizos, and Indian servants and retainers, was scattered thinly throughout the region. Santa Fe was the only place that approximated being a town. The Spanish could only muster 170 men with arms. The Pueblos joining the revolt probably had 2,000 or more adult men capable of utilizing native weapons such as bows and arrows. It is possible that some Apache and Navajo participated in the revolt.

The Pueblo revolt was typical of millenarian movements in colonial societies. Popé promised that, once the Spanish were killed or expelled, the ancient Pueblo gods would reward them with health and prosperity. Popé's plan was that the inhabitants of each Pueblo would rise up and kill the Spanish in their area and then all would advance on Santa Fe to kill or expel all the remaining Spanish. The date set for the uprising was August 11, 1680. Popé dispatched runners to all the Pueblos carrying knotted cords. Each morning the Pueblo leadership was to untie one knot from the cord, and when the last knot was untied, that would be the signal for them to rise against the Spaniards in unison. On August 9, however, the Spaniards were warned of the impending revolt by southern Tiwa leaders and they captured two Tesuque Pueblo youths entrusted with carrying the message to the pueblos. They were tortured to make them reveal the significance of the knotted cord.

Popé then ordered that the revolt begin a day early. The Hopi pueblos located on the remote Hopi Mesas of Arizona did not receive the advanced notice for the beginning of the revolt and followed the schedule for the revolt On August 10, the Pueblos rose up, stole Spanish horses to prevent them fleeing, sealed off roads leading to Santa Fe, and pillaged Spanish settlements. A total of 400 people were killed, including men, women, children, and 21 of the 33 Franciscan missionaries in New Mexico. Survivors fled to Santa Fe and Isleta Pueblo, 10 miles south of Albuquerque and one of the Pueblos that did not participate in the rebellion. By August 13, all the Spanish settlements in New Mexico had been destroyed and Santa Fe was besieged. The Pueblo surrounded the city and cut off its water supply. In desperation, on August 21, New Mexico Governor Antonio de Otermín, barricaded in the Governor’s Palace, sallied outside the palace with all of his available men and forced the Pueblo to retreat with heavy losses. He then led the Spaniards out of the city and retreated southward along the Rio Grande, headed for El Paso del Norte. The Pueblo shadowed the Spaniards but did not attack. The Spaniards who had taken refuge in Isleta had also retreated southward on August 15 and on September 6 the two groups of survivors, numbering 1,946, met at Socorro. About 500 of the survivors were Indian slaves. They were escorted to El Paso by a Spanish supply train. The Pueblo did not contest their passage out of New Mexico.

Popé's world

The Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe, seen here in a 1930s postcard, was besieged by the Pueblo in August 1680.

The retreat of the Spaniards left New Mexico in the power of the Pueblos. Popé was a mysterious figure in the history of the southwest as there are many tales of what happened to him and among the Pueblos after the revolt. Later testimony to the Spanish by Pueblo Indians was probably colored by anti-Popé sentiments and a desire to tell the Spanish what they wanted to hear.

Apparently, Popé and his two lieutenants, Alonso Catiti from Santo Domingo and Luis Tupatu from Picuris, traveled from town to town ordering a return "to the state of their antiquity." All crosses, churches, and Christian images were to be destroyed. The people were ordered to cleanse themselves in ritual baths, to use their Pueblo names, and to destroy all vestiges of the Roman Catholic religion and Spanish culture, including Spanish livestock and fruit trees. Popé, it was said, forbade the planting of wheat and barley and commanded those Indians who had been married according to the rites of the Catholic Church to dismiss their wives and to take others after the old native tradition.

The Pueblo had no tradition of political unity. Each pueblo was self-governing and some, or all, apparently resisted Popé's demands for a return to a pre-Spanish existence. The paradise Popé had promised when the Spanish were expelled did not materialize. A drought continued, destroying Pueblo crops, and the raids by Apache and Navajo increased. Initially, however, the Pueblos were united in their objective of preventing a return of the Spanish.

Popé was deposed as the leader of the Pueblos about a year after the revolt and disappears from history. He is believed to have died shortly before the Spanish reconquest in 1692.

Spanish attempt to return

The most important cause of the Pueblo Revolt was probably the attempt of the Spanish to destroy their religion, banning traditional dances and religious icons such as these kachina dolls.

In November 1681, Otermin attempted to return to New Mexico. He assembled a force of 146 Spanish and an equal number of Indian soldiers in El Paso and marched north along the Rio Grande. He first encountered the Piro pueblos which had been abandoned and their churches destroyed. At Isleta pueblo he fought a brief battle with the inhabitants and then accepted their surrender. Staying in Isleta, he dispatched a company of soldiers and Indians to establish Spanish authority. The Pueblo feigned surrender while gathering a large force to oppose Otermin. With the threat of a Pueblo attack growing, on January 1, 1682 Otermin decided to return to El Paso, burning pueblos and taking the people of Isleta with him. The first Spanish attempt to regain control of New Mexico had failed.

Some of the Isleta later returned to New Mexico, but others remained in El Paso, living in the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo. The Piro also moved to El Paso to live among the Spaniards, eventually forming part of the Piro, Manso, and Tiwa tribe.

The Spanish were never able to re-convince some Pueblos to join Santa Fe de Nuevo México, and the Spanish often returned seeking peace instead of reconquest. For example, the Hopi remained free of any Spanish attempt at reconquest; though they did, at several non-violent attempts, try for unsuccessful peace treaties and unsuccessful trade agreements. For some Pueblos, the Revolt was a success in their aim to drive away European influence.

Reconquest

The Spanish return to New Mexico was prompted by their fears of French advances into the Mississippi valley and their desire to create a defense frontier against the increasingly aggressive nomadic Indians on their northern borders. In August 1692, Diego de Vargas marched to Santa Fe unopposed along with a converted Zia war captain, Bartolomé de Ojeda. De Vargas, with only sixty soldiers, one hundred Indian auxiliaries, seven cannons (which he used as leverage against the Pueblo inside Santa Fe), and one Franciscan priest, arrived at Santa Fe on September 13. He promised the 1,000 Pueblo people assembled there clemency and protection if they would swear allegiance to the King of Spain and return to the Christian faith. After a while the Pueblo rejected the Spaniards. After much persuading, the Spanish finally made the Pueblo agree to peace. On September 14, 1692, de Vargas proclaimed a formal act of repossession. It was the thirteenth town he had reconquered for God and King in this manner, he wrote jubilantly to the Conde de Galve, viceroy of New Spain. During the next month de Vargas visited other Pueblos and accepted their acquiescence to Spanish rule.

Though the 1692 agreement to peace was bloodless, in the years that followed de Vargas maintained increasingly severe control over the increasingly defiant Pueblo. De Vargas returned to Mexico and gathered together about 800 people, including 100 soldiers, and returned to Santa Fe in December 1693. This time, however, 70 Pueblo warriors and 400 family members within the town opposed his entry. De Vargas and his forces staged a quick and bloody recapture that concluded with the surrender and execution of the 70 Pueblo warriors and with their families sentenced to ten years' servitude.

In 1696 the Indians of fourteen pueblos attempted a second organized revolt, launched with the murders of five missionaries and thirty-four settlers and using weapons the Spanish themselves had traded to the Indians over the years; de Vargas's retribution was unmerciful, thorough and prolonged. By the end of the century the last resisting Pueblo town had surrendered and the Spanish reconquest was essentially complete. Many of the Pueblos, however, fled New Mexico to join the Apache or Navajo or to attempt to re-settle on the Great Plains. One of their settlements has been found in Kansas at El Quartalejo.

While the independence of many pueblos from the Spaniards was short-lived, the Pueblo Revolt gained the Pueblo Indians a measure of freedom from future Spanish efforts to eradicate their culture and religion following the reconquest. Moreover, the Spanish issued substantial land grants to each Pueblo and appointed a public defender to protect the rights of the Indians and argue their legal cases in the Spanish courts. The Franciscan priests returning to New Mexico did not again attempt to impose a theocracy on the Pueblo who continued to practice their traditional religion.

~Article collage from Wikipedia~

Solving the Decalogue Stone

The Stan Fox Translation

Vatian Kol an expert on proto Hebrew Characters in writing states;

"The hebrew translation, Bret, is trying by all means to legitimize the script as their own; as naturally at this point the problem starts!

18th and in particular 19th century are notoriously known for fake works. Therefore before asking the question of: what does the script represent: ritual or religious reasons, there must be decided of what kind of language has been applied on the Decalogue Stone: Latin?, Cirlik?, Illyrik?, etc,.

As I asked you earlier, about the bottom/first line damaged: That's not because of the natives 'basic warning', (if that was the case then they could’ve easily chisel the whole structure, even without leaving a single bitt of trace around), but according to my experience, I think: apart from the deceive-conversion of the principal characters, such as the *X one into horizontal hebrew character *A, technically in the first line, there is not enough space between words, to somehow clearly justify the translation from ancient hebrew, as you’ve agreed".

Intermediate Script referred to as Proto or Ancient Hebrew also it was suggested by scholars that it is an old version of the Ten Commandments with letter groupings resembling the Tetragrammaton suggesting that it is a Samaritan mezuzah. I agree with this, and the following is what I believe the reasons were.

I believe the writing occurred during Spanish Indian War (Pueblo Revolt) 1500's written by an early colonist during the Spanish inquisition which targeted what they called Converso Jewish meaning forced to convert to Catholicism for fear of death from the inquisition. Some of these early pioneers of New mexico were in fact secret Jews practicing their religion in secret places like the location of the Decalogue Stone.

In 1598, when Juan de Onate took the first colonists north to make a permanent settlement, his band of 135 soldiers, farmers, and their families were reluctant travelers. But some of them were under investigation by the Inquisition, making removal to even so unpromising a destination advisable. Indication is strong that several of those on the muster roll of January 8 were conversos who had been recruited because they were already on the lists of the Holy Office. Juan, Miguel, and Antonio Rodriguez and Francisco Herniindez had, in fact, already been burned in effigy two years before. Their families and friends could only have wished to follow them into the wilderness to find freedom, however limited and tenuous, to preserve the traditions of their ancestors. Many did in the subsequent decades.

Today I believe this artifact serves as a reminder of the rich history of the area for which I live and the bloody history of wars is not a reflection on those who have faith in the creator. It is also a reminder of where we came from in antiquity. A symbol of the stars with clues to our world language of origin. We are all connected in this way through genetic memory, and the trauma of mistakes made in the past concerning ritual abuse. No one owns anything, and no one ever dies. Lets not repeat the mistakes made by our ancestors, but rather grow spiritually as one, within a universal mind.