{"it":{"id":"NAM-LUN","kind":"site","sub":"Americas","name":"Los Lunas Decalogue Stone","place":"USA","lat":34.785,"lon":-106.997,"date":"disputed; mainstream: modern (20th c) inscription","mat":"basalt boulder","nfacts":4,"tags":["Americas"],"sum":"A basalt boulder near Los Lunas, New Mexico, is carved with a nine-line version of the Ten Commandments in an early form of Hebrew script.","why":"The Los Lunas stone is a test of evidence: a clear inscription with no secure date, on public land anyone can visit.","src":[431],"nsrc":2,"yt":"What would a genuine one need?","rel":["NAM-006","W11A32"],"hook":"An 80-ton boulder in New Mexico carries a text some read as Hebrew. Nobody has proved who carved it."},"S":{"431":["Wikipedia: Los Lunas Decalogue Stone","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Lunas_Decalogue_Stone"]},"rec":{"id":"NAM-LUN","alias":[],"ms":[{"f":"boulder","a":"mass","v":">80","u":"t","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Los Lunas Decalogue Stone","yr":"2026","m":"as stated","c":"Wikipedia Los Lunas Decalogue Stone","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Los_Lunas_Decalogue_Stone&oldid=1381254019","b":"S","bb":"","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M3447"},{"f":"inscription","a":"lines","v":"9","u":"count","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Los Lunas Decalogue Stone","yr":"2026","m":"as stated","c":"Wikipedia Los Lunas Decalogue Stone","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Los_Lunas_Decalogue_Stone&oldid=1381254019","b":"S","bb":"","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M3448"},{"f":"site","a":"distance S of Albuquerque","v":"56","u":"km","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Los Lunas Decalogue Stone","yr":"2026","m":"as stated","c":"Wikipedia Los Lunas Decalogue Stone","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Los_Lunas_Decalogue_Stone&oldid=1381254019","b":"S","bb":"","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M3449"},{"f":"inscription","a":"mainstream","v":"hoax / modern","u":"text","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Los Lunas Decalogue Stone","yr":"2026","m":"derived","c":"Wikipedia Los Lunas Decalogue Stone","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Los_Lunas_Decalogue_Stone&oldid=1381254019","b":"S","bb":"","t":"INTERPRETATION","n":"Feder 2011","id":"M3450"}],"lab":[],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[{"a":"footprint","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"height","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"key_structure_dims","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"largest_block","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"slope_face_angle","r":"no published face/slope angle in sources reached (often n/a for non-pyramidal sites)"},{"a":"wall_batter","r":"no published batter survey in free sources"},{"a":"orientation","r":"no published azimuth reached"},{"a":"corner_precision","r":"no published precision survey in free sources"},{"a":"levelness","r":"no published levelling survey in free sources"},{"a":"rock_type","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"geochem_petro","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"quarry_source","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"mortar","r":"dry-stone construction or no binder analysis in free sources"},{"a":"tool_marks","r":"no tool-mark study in free sources reached"},{"a":"dating","r":"no absolute date extracted"},{"a":"coords_elevation","r":"no elevation row yet"},{"a":"volume_labor","r":"no volume/labour estimate in sources opened"},{"a":"construction_phases","r":"no phase sequence in sources opened"},{"a":"lab_date_material","r":"no lab date with dated material in sources opened"},{"a":"hydrology_acoustics","r":"no published hydrology/acoustic measurement in sources opened"},{"a":"magnetic_radiation","r":"no published magnetic/radiation survey found (searched site name + magnetometry/radiation; Wikipedia, Google Scholar snippets)"},{"a":"metals_clamps","r":"no metal/clamp evidence reported in sources opened"},{"a":"excavation_history","r":"no excavation history row yet"},{"a":"artifacts_found","r":"no finds row yet"}],"dat":[],"aa":[{"id":"AA067","a":"ancient Hebrew inscription","who":"James Tabor (1997, considered); diffusionists","main":"modern inscription","ms":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Los_Lunas_Decalogue_Stone&oldid=1381254019","st":"contradicted","n":"Feder 2011","nl":3}],"ac":[{"v":"Los Lunas stone is an ancient Hebrew Decalogue","who":"James Tabor (1997, considered); diffusionists","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Los_Lunas_Decalogue_Stone&oldid=1381254019","b":"I","ce":"modern script features; no early record"}],"me":[{"v":"modern hoax/inscription","ev":"Feder 2011 Encyclopedia of Dubious Archaeology","s":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Los_Lunas_Decalogue_Stone&oldid=1381254019"}],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"sub":[],"site":{"age":"disputed; mainstream: modern (20th c) inscription","dm":"historical/stylistic (INTERPRETATION)","lab":"NO","weak":"no lab date opened","unesco":"","dens":"STUB"},"co":{"lat":"34.78522","lon":"-106.99651","src":"Wikidata/enwiki (Q3071844)","agree":"agree","b":"V","note":"Wikidata/enwiki (Q3071844) vs OSM node 8210120017 delta 0.0000 deg","osm":"https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/8210120017"},"src":[{"id":"W11S71","t":"Wikipedia Los Lunas Decalogue Stone","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Los_Lunas_Decalogue_Stone&oldid=1381254019"},{"id":null,"t":"Wikipedia: Los Lunas Decalogue Stone","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Lunas_Decalogue_Stone"},{"id":"VNAM-LUN-3","t":"New Mexico State Land Office: Mystery Stone profile (2020)","u":"https://www.nmstatelands.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Mystery-Stone-Profile-FINAL-1.pdf"},{"id":null,"t":"Perkins, Mark and Kennedy, Titus, “The Los Lunas Decalogue Stone: Genuine or Hoax?”, CTS Journal (Chafer Theological Seminary), read in the copy reproduced on a University of California, Riverside faculty site","u":"https://faculty.ucr.edu/~legneref/biados/Decalogue%20Stone/Decalogue%20Stone.htm"},{"id":null,"t":"McCulloch, Huston, “The Los Lunas Decalogue Stone”, personal research page hosted by Ohio State University, summarising the epigraphic literature, labelled secondary","u":"https://www.asc.ohio-state.edu/mcculloch.2/arch/loslunas.html"},{"id":null,"t":"Davila, James, “The Los Lunas inscription, once more”, PaleoJudaica (2016), blog of a University of St Andrews scholar of ancient Judaism, labelled secondary","u":"https://paleojudaica.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-los-lunas-inscription-once-more.html"}],"sum":"One word on the stone decides a great deal. In the Ten Commandments as given in Exodus 20, the Sabbath command begins with \"remember.\" The Samaritans, an ancient community with its own version of the law, wrote \"preserve.\" When the Samaritan specialist Reinhard Pummer looked at the inscription on a boulder in the New Mexico desert, he saw \"remember,\" and he saw no clause about a temple on Mount Gerizim, which Samaritan versions include. The text, he said, cannot be Samaritan. That single verb cuts off one of the most serious attempts to argue that the Los Lunas Decalogue Stone is ancient.\n\nThe stone sits at the base of Hidden Mountain, near Los Lunas in Valencia County, about 35 miles south of Albuquerque, on state trust land. It is a volcanic basalt boulder that the State Land Office puts at 80 tons; the geologist George Morehouse put it at 80 to 100 tons, of the same basalt as the cap of the mesa above, and judged that it has slid about two-thirds of the way down from the mesa top since breaking off. Into its flat face someone cut nine lines of characters. Read as Hebrew, they give an abridged Ten Commandments that follows the Masoretic text of Exodus 20, the standard Jewish version. The panel is tilted about 40 degrees from the horizontal, which Morehouse read as a sign that the boulder settled after the carving was made.\n\nThe writing is odd. The researchers Mark Perkins and Titus Kennedy counted the characters line by line, 28, 21, 28, 21, 28, 29, 25, 25 and 10, and found the first three lines crowded almost together while the last six are spaced about a letter apart. The script mixes Phoenician-style letters, the old alphabet also used for early Hebrew, with Greek letters and other Semitic forms. Some read its punctuation as modern; the amateur epigrapher Barry Fell argued it was consistent with antiquity. Others point to many errors of style and grammar.\n\nEverything about its early history runs through one man. The State Land Office says the stone was first documented in 1933 by Frank Hibben, an archaeology professor at the University of New Mexico; Perkins and Kennedy give 1936. In a 1996 interview with the religious studies professor James Tabor, Hibben said he was \"convinced the inscription is ancient,\" that the letters were covered with lichen and patina and hardly visible when he first saw them, and that a guide took him there who had seen the text as a boy in the 1880s. But Hibben's word comes with a burden. He was accused of fabricating some or all of his data in other parts of his career, in at least two separate incidents by one count and at least three by another, cases where he claimed major finds with no supporting evidence.\n\nEven the 1880s would not rule out a forger. The old Hebrew script, close kin to Phoenician, was known to scholars by at least 1870. Perkins and Kennedy concluded that the text was cut by someone with little or no knowledge of Hebrew, who copied no known ancient inscription, after the old script had been rediscovered, and with modern tools. They thought the spot itself an unlikely place for a monumental inscription, near what could only have been a temporary campsite, and dated the work to the late 19th or early 20th century. They even suggested the mixed letters might have been chosen deliberately, to look older.\n\nThe archaeologist Kenneth Feder called the stone \"almost certainly a fake.\" His strongest point is what is missing. Anyone who travelled from the Near East to this hillside would have \"stopped along the way, encamped, eaten food, broken things, disposed of trash, performed rituals,\" and left a trail of physical evidence across the Southwest. None has been found. The British archaeologist Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews judged it \"a clear, but well constructed forgery (for its day).\" James Davila, a scholar of ancient Judaism at St Andrews, wrote in 2016 that no epigrapher of ancient Hebrew is willing to defend it, that no trained specialist has published a peer-reviewed case for authenticity, and that Tabor himself had changed his mind.\n\nThe other side has its arguments. Morehouse, a colleague of Fell writing for the Epigraphic Society, compared the weathering of the letters with a nearby graffito dated 1930 and proposed an age of 500 to 2,000 years, explaining the fresh look of the letters by generations of visitors scrubbing them to read them. The scholar Cyrus Gordon proposed that the stone is a Samaritan mezuzah, a large slab set at a gateway with a shortened Decalogue, as the Samaritans made them, and placed it in the Byzantine period; Pummer's \"remember\" is the strongest answer to that. Michael Skupin argued in 1989 from the spelling mistakes that the carver spoke Greek first and knew Hebrew mostly by ear, while admitting that none of this proves anything. Other stories make the carvers Mormon soldiers of a battalion that passed through during the Mexican-American War.\n\nThe physical evidence that might have settled it is fading. The boulder is too heavy to move to a laboratory. Scrubbing by visitors over the years has probably destroyed any chance of analysing the patina. In April 2006 vandals obliterated the first line. The State of New Mexico still manages the site as a visitor attraction and invites hikers, with a recreational access permit, to make up their own minds. The walk is just over a mile there and back.\n\nWhat makes the stone worth thinking about is not that it is probably modern. It is how a clear text on public land, with no secure date, could gather a following for close to a century. Whoever cut it, in whatever century, chose the most authoritative text of a whole civilisation and a script older than the one most readers could read, and set it where it would be found. Either way, the carver understood the power of an old law in an old alphabet.\n\nNobody has named the carver. Perkins and Kennedy wondered whether he might have been a local rancher with some knowledge of ancient Hebrew, and said only further work could tell. The only witness to an early date is Hibben's unnamed guide. If a real ancient inscription were ever found in the Americas, it would need what this one lacks: a secure find, a context of camps and broken things, and a script that fits a time and place. What would it take for you to believe one, and would you recognise it if it lay on a hillside in plain view?","qs":["Ancient voyage or modern hoax: what evidence would change your mind?","Why does the 1933 date matter so much?","Should a disputed inscription be protected like an ancient one?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f6/10_Commandment_Rock.jpg/1280px-10_Commandment_Rock.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:10_Commandment_Rock.jpg","title":"10 Commandment Rock.jpg","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","by":"Brainardo at English Wikipedia","cap":"Los Lunas Decalogue Stone Photograph taken in January 1997 west of Los Lunas, New Mexico - Brian Haines"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4a/Los_Lunas_Decalogue_Stone_Vandalized%2C_Aug._13%2C_2006.jpg/1280px-Los_Lunas_Decalogue_Stone_Vandalized%2C_Aug._13%2C_2006.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Los_Lunas_Decalogue_Stone_Vandalized,_Aug._13,_2006.jpg","title":"Los Lunas Decalogue Stone Vandalized, Aug. 13, 2006.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0","by":"HuMcCulloch","cap":"Los Lunas NM Decalogue Stone with first line vandalized. Taken Aug. 13, 2006. Los Lunas Decalogue Stone"}]},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":[{"v":"80+","u":"t","h":"Too heavy to move to a museum for study","s":[164]},{"v":"Basalt boulder","h":"Made of","s":[164]}],"hs":{"164":["Wikipedia: Los Lunas Decalogue Stone (and sources cited there)","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Lunas_Decalogue_Stone"]},"lh":{"s":"img/h/NAM-LUN.webp","w":1280,"h":865,"o":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f6/10_Commandment_Rock.jpg/1280px-10_Commandment_Rock.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail"}}