The Davenport Tablet shown here is one of a handful of artifacts discovered in the Cook Farm Mound by Reverend Jacob Gass in 1877. It is covered with characters from a number of Old World alphabets. (Proceedings of the Davenport Academy of Natural Sciences, 1876-1878)
In 1877, the Reverend Jacob Gass discovered two inscribed slate tablets in a mound on a farm in Davenport, Iowa. One of the tablets had a series of inscribed concentric circles with enigmatic signs believed by some to be zodiacal. The other had various animal figures, a tree, and a few other marks on one face; its reverse face had a series of apparently alphabetic characters from half a dozen different languages across the top, and the depiction of a presumed cremation scene on the bottom. Gass discovered or came into possession of a number of other enigmatic artifacts ostensibly associated with the moundbuilder culture,
including two pipes whose bowls were carved into the shape of elephants.
The discoveries in Davenport generated great excitement. However, the fact that such a concentration of apparently conclusive finds regarding the moundbuilder controversy had been discovered by a single individual within a radius of a few miles of one Iowa town caused many to question the authenticity of the discoveries.
Cyrus Thomas launched an in-depth investigation of the tablets. Evidence from Gass’s excavation indicated pretty clearly that the tablets had been planted only recently in the mound. Also, Thomas believed that he had identified the source of the bizarre, multiple-alphabetic inscription: Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary of 1872 presented a sample of characters from ancient alphabets; all of the letters on the tablet were in the dictionary, and most were close copies.
Thomas (1894, 64142) suggested that the dictionary was the source for the tablet inscription.
Marshall McKusick (1991) reports a confession by a Davenport citizen, who alleged that the tablets and the other artifacts were frauds perpetrated by a group of men who wished to make Gass appear foolish. Though there are some significant problems with the confession (most notably the fact that the confessor was too young to have been an active participant in the hoax), the Davenport Tablets were certainly fraudulent.
More recently, McKusick has discerned the presence of lowercase Greek letters on the second Davenport Tablet--but lowercase Greek letters were not invented until medieval times. McKusick has also identified Arabic numbers, Roman letters,
musical clefs, and ampersands (&) on the tablet. Their presence is clear proof of the Fraudulent nature of the stone. In fact, no genuine artifacts containing writing in any Old World alphabet have ever been found in any of the mounds.
Further Reading
The definitive work on the Davenport Tablets is the book The Davenport Conspiracy Revisited by archaeologist Marshall McKusick (1991).
