Newark

The Newark Holy Stones

In 1860 the surveyor David Wyrick, digging in the ancient earthworks near Newark, Ohio, brought up a stone wedge with a Hebrew inscription, and a few months later a black stone case carrying a figure of Moses and the full text of the Ten Commandments in Hebrew. For those who held that the mounds were built by the lost tribes of Israel this was decisive. Hebraists pointed at once to the difficulty: the letters are not palaeo-Hebrew but the square script, which came into use a thousand years after the mounds, and they follow the shapes of a common Hebrew Bible then being printed in Ohio. A stone bowl found with them was later identified as a modern whetstone.