a view of the first inscribed rock found -- see transliteration below |
[Nyerges is the former editor of Wilderness Way magazine and American
Survival Guide. He is the author of How
to Survive Anywhere, Enter the Forest, and other books. He has led
wilderness trips into the Angeles National Forest for over 40 years. He can be reached at Box 41834, Eagle Rock,
CA 90041, or www.ChristopherNyerges.com.]
[An
extract from Nyerges’ Kindle book “Ancient Writing on Rock,” also available from
the Store at www.SchoolofSelf-Reliance.com,
which goes into much more detail about the site and various opinions about it.]
On Halloween day in 2001, I was leading a birthday
outing for a 10 year old boy and his friends at the 3000 foot level of the
Angeles National Forest. We were
getting late, so I led them down into the stream so we could make soap from the
yucca leaves. It was a spot where I would never ordinarily go. As the boys and I made our yucca soap, my
gaze was drawn to the back side of a large, 10 foot wide boulder with unusual
markings on it. There were two large
horizontal cleavages and numerous markings across the cleavage that bore an
uncanny resemblance to ogam.
I pointed it out to every one and explained ogam to
the adults, who seemed underwhelmed at what such a rock might mean.
I returned a week later with Dude McLean to take
photographs and sketches. McLean had
also been there when I first noted the rock.
After carefully comparing my sketches with the ogam alphabet, I was
amazed to see that all the marks were consistent with ogam. So I then sent photos and sketches to
perhaps 50 “experts” in ogam, linguistics, archaelogy, and other fields and
eagerly awaited their response about my exciting discovery.
Ogam is not to be confused with the more ornate
runic writing. Ogam employs straight lines across what is called a stem line.
The stem line can be a natural horizontal fracture in a rock, or the corner of
a standing stone. The 15 consonants are
expressed by from one to five lines above the stem line, one to five lines
below the stem line, or one to five lines across the stem lines. The vowels,
where present, can be a series of dots or other symbols. It is certainly possible to see natural
fractures in rock and think you are looking at ogam, especially if you have not
studied rock sufficiently to see the difference between what nature does and
what man does.
Gloria Farley, author of “In Plain Sight,” responded, saying it certainly looked like
ogam, but that she had no idea what it might say since she had all her
discoveries translated by Barry Fell, who had passed away. One expert from England responded, saying
that since the rock inscription was in California, there was no chance that it
was bonafide ogam. Another told me that
it was clearly a significant find, but he felt it was more likely some sort of
tally system, not ogam. But most of the
various world experts ignored me.
So I laid out what I felt was a fairly reasonable
scientific method for ascertaining if the inscription I found was, or was not,
of some significance.
1.
Were
the markings consistent with the ogam alphabet. If so, I would proceed to the other steps.
2.
Did
the ogam letters actually spell anything.
3.
Could
the inscription could actually be dated.
4.
Was there was anything else significant about
the site.
5.
The
final step – if I got that far – was to determine who may have actually
inscribed the rock, and under what circumstances. I also reasoned that if I got
this far, others could jump in and attempt to answer this question.
Since all the markings were consistent with the ogam
characters, I then proceeded to determine the actual sequence of letters. It took me approximately 6 visits in
different lighting conditions until I arrived at what I felt was the correct
letter sequence. I attempted to confirm
my deductions by carefully feeling the indentations in the rock.
Next, with my sequence of letters, I tried to
determine if it spelled anything. Ogam
was used primarily to express Gaelic, but had also been used in some known
instances to represent both Saharan and Basque. I needed experts or dictionaries.
One night, while staring at my photos of the rock
and the letter sequence, the two letters MC jumped out at me, and I realized
that the rock inscription was most likely written in the most common language
of usage for ogam, Gaelic. MC is a very
common abbreviation for “son of,” as in McDonald, MacAllister, et al.
I obtained a copy of Dwelley’s “Illustrated Gaelic-English Dictionary” (copyright
1902-12) and one rainy day about two months after finding the rock, I spent
about five hours going through Dwelley’s page by page, looking for letter
combinations that might mean something. All the letters I had to work with were
consonants. There were no vowells, suggestive of an older or earlier linguistic
form, akin to several of the Middle Eastern alphabets written without vowels.
Based on the manner in which the markings were made
on the rock, I broke the letter sequence into the following groupings: B- MMH-
BL- ?MG-MC-MM-DH-B. I then tried to
find words for which those letter groupings would represent. Part of this search was to see what was
commonly written on other such stones.
After a few months, I came up with the following
possible transliteration:
To-memory-Bel- Thy Young Hero- Son of – Mother – Deep/depth/ darken-
stone. “Bel” was actually written above the main line of the inscription. So my translation reads: To Bel, in the
memory of the young hero, son of the mother (prince?), laid to rest with this
stone.” I found at least one stone in
which scholars translated “DH” as “laid to rest.” Thus, I had achieved Step Two
in my process, and proceeded to the next Step.
Two different geologists, one a PhD, told me that
such inscriptions could not be definitely dated. The PhD said that based on his educated guess, the inscription
was made between 1500 and 2500 years ago, and he’d say it was 95% certain that
it was made by man, not natural forces.
I proceeded to Step Four with various informal
surveys of the surrounding area. First, IF the rock inscription was formed by
natural forces, it would be logical that there would be many or more such carvings in the vicinity. Within a
quarter mile of the stone, I found one possible standing stone, one triangular
pointing stone (pointed up a side canyon), and a nearby site that had all the
appearances of being an ancient graveyard based on the placement of stones –
though I did no digging. A few years
after the initial discovery I found another rock near the standing stone with
an ogam inscription of B-EA-N-EA, which I eventually concluded must be in
reference to Byanu. In time, other features were identified at this site, such
as two dolmens, acorn leaching rocks, and other enigmatic features.
Thus, amazingly, everything suggested that this was
a foreign inscription, probably someone from Western Europe who came up the
canyon and died, or was killed. I shared
my work with my friend who was the editor of the local paper, and he
sent a reporter to write a story about it.
The ensuing newspaper story accurately represented my work on the rock
and inscription, and also included interviews with others who said I was making
fanciful claims, though none of them had ever gone to see the site.
Though the final chapter of this rock has not been
written, it has enforced the belief that our history is not as we’ve been
taught in school. Indeed, the schools are often the official gurgitators
of the best that academia has been able
to collectively come up with. They get
a lot of it right, but they fail to see their own blindnesses and
prejudices.
My rewards for taking all this time on this
multi-faceted research: I have been
called a fraud numerous times. I have
been listed on a college web-site as an example of “fringe archaeology” and
explained away as a fraud.
On the other hand, I was made a life member in the
Epigraphic Society. According to Wayne
Kenaston, Jr., who bestowed that membership upon me, “Welcome to the frustrations that come with dealing with rock –writing,
or epigraphy. You did a very good and
scholarly job of deciphering, transliterating, and translating the Angeles
Forest Mystery Rock inscriptions. I
congratulate you and encourage you to pursue your efforts to learn more about
the provenance of the ‘young hero’ whose grave is probably marked by the
inscription.”
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