by Mike Smith
Daily Lobo
Drive 18 miles west of the central New Mexico village of Los Lunas, and you drive into a world of dirt, rocks and little else.
In the middle of all that dirt, however, slumps an extinct, dust-caked volcano - a mountain in ruins, weathering away beneath the sun. And on the side of that little mountain - Hidden Mountain - on a tilted column of sickly brown andesite, shines a large inscription - 216 letters, in nine lines, from an alphabet older than any known European settlement in North America.
"Amateur archeologists, historians, and epigraphers have given it a variety of translations and interpretations," wrote UNM Archeologist Joseph C. Winter in his unpublished 1984 document, "The Mystery of Mystery Stone." Possible translations include an archaic rendition of the Ten Commandments, a message from ancient Mormons, a 200-year-old carving made by a Jewish Spaniard, a 4,000-year-old message left by ancestors of the Navajos, a treasure map inscribed by the ancestors of the Acoma Indians, a 2,500-year-old story etched by a Greek explorer, a message left by the Romans, an elaborate college prank, a note delivered by one of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel or perhaps even a oblique message left by a Hebrew-speaking extra-terrestrial.
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Most theories of how these strange letters came to be where they are have slipped away almost immediately after being advanced. One of the more tenacious explanations is that the writing is a form of ancient Greek and tells the story of Zakyneros, a wandering Greek sailor circa 500 B.C.
"I have come to this place to stay," translated epigrapher Dixie L. Perkins in The Meaning of the New Mexico Mystery Stone. "The other one met with an untimely death one year ago; dishonored, insulted, and stripped of flesh; the men thought him to be an object of care, whom I looked after, considered crazed, wandering in mind, to be tossed about as if in a wind; to perish, streamed
with blood."
This translation wasn't produced until 1979, though, and it was preceded by - among other attempts - what was almost certainly a more accurate translation, made in 1949 by Harvard scholar Robert Pfeiffer. Pfeiffer, an expert in Semitic languages, concluded that the mysterious inscription was written in a form of Paleo-Hebrew and paraphrased the Ten Commandments.
"I am Yahweh thy God who brought thee out of the land," Pfeiffer's translation began. "There shall not be unto them other gods before Me."
Pfeiffer's Paleo-Hebrew translation has been accepted as generally accurate by a wide range of people, including Todd Eaton, a self-taught petroglyph enthusiast, David Allen Deal, author of Discovery of Lost America, historian Ferenc Szasz and university archeologists who believe that, yes, it's written in Paleo-Hebrew, but it's still a hoax.
"There is absolutely no firm evidence that the glyph was known before the 1930s," Winter wrote. He suggested that two nearby inscriptions reading "Hobe Eva 3-19-30 1930," were carved by the same UNM students he believed carved the inscription on the Mystery Stone - citing as evidence the remembrances of former UNM professors, the availability of Semitic language Bibles and textbooks from UNM's Zimmerman Library, and the relatively new-looking appearance of the inscription.
For as long as the truth behind this story remains uncertain, the mystery of the New Mexico Mystery Stone will leave us free to believe in whatever we like - in pre-Columbian wayfarers, in passing Greeks or Spaniards or in epic college pranks - free to believe in whatever makes the world feel the most mysterious to us, the most complex and interconnected or, simply, the most fun.
Mike Smith is a UNM history major and the author of Towns of the Sandia Mountains. He will be selling and signing copies of his book Friday at 1 p.m. at the UNM Bookstore and Saturday at 3 p.m. at Page One Bookstore. Stop by either signing and get a free "My Strange New Mexico" cabbit button.
