An anomalous inscription
On the side of Hidden Mountain, about 35 miles south of Albuquerque, rests a volcanic basalt boulder estimated to weigh between 80 and 100 tons. Carved into a flattened panel on the rock are nine lines of text. The script is identified as a form of Paleo-Hebrew, an ancient alphabet related to Phoenician. The text itself is an abridged version of the Decalogue, or the Ten Commandments, from the book of Exodus.
The first recorded mention of the stone came in 1933 from Frank Hibben, an archaeologist at the University of New Mexico. Hibben claimed he was taken to the site by a local guide who had first seen the inscription in the 1880s. This early date is a foundation for theories of pre-Columbian contact, as knowledge of Paleo-Hebrew was not widespread at that time. However, Hibben's own credibility suffered from later accusations that he fabricated archaeological data in other instances to support his theories. The stone's inscription has several unusual features. It mixes Paleo-Hebrew letterforms with characters that resemble ancient Greek and Samaritan scripts. This blend of writing systems, along with several grammatical and spelling errors, is a major disagreement for those who study the artifact.
Competing origin stories
There is no archaeological consensus on the stone's origin, and three main theories persist. One theory suggests the inscription is ancient, created by a group of Israelites who reached the Americas before Columbus. This would align with Hibben's initial claims of a 19th-century discovery. Proponents of this view point to the archaic letter forms as evidence of its age.
Another hypothesis places its creation in the Spanish colonial period. This theory proposes that "Conversos" or "Crypto-Jews"—Jews who were forced to convert to Catholicism during the Spanish Inquisition but secretly maintained their faith—carved the stone. Archaeolinguist Cyrus Gordon suggested it might be a Samaritan mezuzah, a type of large stone slab with the Decalogue placed at the entrance to a property, potentially from the Byzantine period around 390 A.D.
Most academics believe is that the inscription is a 20th-century forgery. Arguments for this point to the crisp, sharp nature of the cuts, which suggest modern tools. Geologists and archaeologists have noted a lack of significant patina or weathering within the carvings, which would be expected on an ancient inscription exposed to the desert environment for centuries. Many visitors have cleaned the inscription over the years, complicating any scientific analysis of its age. The mixture of different alphabets and the specific errors in the text are also seen by many experts as signs of a modern hoax, created by someone with a limited, academic knowledge of the ancient languages.