Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
June 1958 | Volume 9, Issue 4
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
June 1958 | Volume 9, Issue 4
Dighton Rock is a mysterious tide-washed boulder that juts up out of the Taunton River at Assonet Neck, just across from the town of Dighton, Massachusetts, and the Dighton Yacht Club. To yachtsmen sailing the river and even to some residents of Assonet Neck, it looks like just another rock, about eleven feet long and five feet high, standing where the river widens abruptly on its way to Mount Hope Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. Until recently, no road has led to it, and few travelers ventured to follow the unmarked path which took them to the site. Yet to historians and archeologists, the rock has been a focus of marvel and speculation ever since the year A.D. 1690, when the Reverend Cotton Mather, of witchcraft and brimstone fame, described it and the curious message engraved on its weathered, red-brown sandstone face.
“Among the other Curiosities of New-England ,” Mather wrote 268 years ago in The Wonderful Works of God Commemorated , “One is that of a mighty Rock, on a perpendicular side whereof by a River, which at High Tide covers part of it, there are very deeply Engraved, no man alive knows How or When about half a score Lines , near Ten Foot Long , and a foot and half broad , filled with strange Characters: which would suggest as odd Thoughts about them that were here before us, as there are odd Shapes in that Elaborate Monument.…”
Who carved the baffling message into the face of the rock? And what does the message say? From Cotton Mather’s day to ours, there has been no lack of imaginative theories. For example:
In 1781 Count Antoine Court de Gebelin of Paris announced that he had fathomed the secret. Dighton Rock commemorated the visit to Massachusetts “in very ancient times” of a shipload of seamen from Carthage, who lived for a while on Mount Hope Bay and established friendly relations with the Indians there. The drawings on the rock, De Gebelin explained, portray the leaders of the expedition consulting an oracle in order to select an auspicious moment for the perilous voyage back to Carthage.
In 1807 Samuel Harris, Jr., a Harvard scholar, declared that he was able to decipher on the face of the rock three ancient Hebrew words in Phoenician letters: “king,” “priest,” and “idol.”
In 1831 Ira Hill, a Maryland schoolteacher, concluded that the rock was engraved in the second month of the tenth year of the reign of King Solomon by an expedition of Tyrians and Jews such as the one described in the Old Testament, I Kings 9: