'Commandment Rock' discovered on mountainside in New Mexico

Los Lunas - The Mystery Stone, otherwise identified as the Decalogue Stone, has been discovered on a mountainside near Albuquerque, New Mexico. Scholars can now decided if the stone is a hoax or if it’s genuine.

According to Atlas Obscura, the Decalogue Stone, also identified as the Commandment Rock, was discovered in Los Lunas, a town located 35 miles south of Albuquerque, New Mexico. The Decalogue Stone was first written about by archaeologist and Professor Frank Hibben of the University of New Mexico in 1933. Hibben viewed the stone when a person claimed to have seen it during the 1880s. Scholars have, in the past, dismissed Hibben’s work because of alleged fabrications in his work. Proponents of the rock’s authenticity claim the stone is a record of the Judeo-Christian Ten Commandments. Other proponents hypothesize that the rock’s inscription is Cypriotic Greek used around 500 BC. Decades later, scholars are wondering if a lost tribe of Israel had inscribed the stone with Paleo-Hebrew script or if it’s fraud because of the “numerous stylistic and grammatical errors that appear in the inscription.” The stone can be easily accessed from the highway and no special materials are needed, notes i09.