The Newark Holy Stones
Hebrew-inscribed stones found in Ohio's ancient earthworks in 1860, offered as proof that the mound builders were Israelites. The lettering is nineteenth-century. The argument they were made to settle was about slavery.
Why this verdict
Debunked by the script itself: the Hebrew on the stones is a post-biblical form that did not exist when the earthworks were built, and the finds fit a documented nineteenth-century argument about the origins of Native Americans.
- Period
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- Reading time
- Sources
01The claim
That stones bearing Hebrew inscriptions, recovered from the Newark Earthworks in Ohio by the surveyor David Wyrick, demonstrate that the builders of the North American mounds were of Old World and specifically Israelite origin — and that mainstream archaeology suppresses them because they contradict the accepted account of Indigenous history.
02Where it came from
Wyrick found the first stone in June 1860 and a second, the Decalogue Stone, in November. The context matters more than the objects. American debate at the time included a school of polygenism arguing that human races had separate origins, used to support slavery; the counter-argument from monogenists held that all peoples descended from Adam and that the mound builders could therefore be a lost Old World people. A Hebrew inscription in an Ohio mound was ammunition in that dispute, and it appeared precisely when it was most useful.
03What the record shows
✕ DEBUNKED — Investigated and refuted. Here is what actually happened.
The inscriptions defeat themselves. The Hebrew on the Decalogue Stone is a compressed post-biblical form with letter shapes and abbreviations belonging to the medieval and modern periods, not to any script in use when the earthworks were constructed between roughly 100 BC and AD 400. Bradley Lepper of the Ohio History Connection, who has examined the stones and their context in detail, notes that the alphabet corresponds to forms available in nineteenth-century Hebrew reference works accessible in Ohio.
The archaeology is equally clear. The Newark Earthworks are a Hopewell construction of extraordinary sophistication — a set of geometric enclosures aligned to an 18.6-year lunar cycle, now inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Their builders were Indigenous people, and the evidence for that is the entire excavated record of the complex.
The suppression claim inverts the actual history: the stones were not buried by academia but examined, published on and displayed, and they remain in a museum collection in Ohio where anyone can see them.
Who made them has never been established with certainty. Suspicion has attached to associates of Wyrick rather than to Wyrick himself, who appears to have believed in them and who died in poverty and disappointment.
04What it cost
The Newark stones belong to a family of claims that reassign Indigenous achievement to someone else, and that is their lasting cost. The Hopewell built a lunar observatory in earth on a continental scale; the claim's function was to insist that they could not have. The stones remain in circulation in Latter-day Saint apologetics and in fringe archaeology, and the earthworks themselves received World Heritage status in 2023 — which is the correct end to the story, and the opposite of a cover-up.