A researcher claiming to have decided the meaning behind some ancient carvings on a wall reckons it points towards the Biblical figure of Moses.
The place is Serabit el-Khadim in Egypt where back in ancient times the locals used to mine turquoise, or perhaps more accurately they got prisoners to do it for them.
It's also home to some of the earliest discovered examples of alphabetic writing, in which carvings resembling letters rather than hieroglyphic images were found.
The carvings are known as 'proto-Sinaitic' script and they've been studied plenty of times in an attempt to work out exactly what they're supposed to say and what message whomever made with the symbols was trying to leave behind for future generations.
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So when researcher Michael Bar-Ron says in a 'proto-thesis' he thinks he's found at least two carvings which say 'Moses' and mention of a golden bull which would be evidence for the existence of the Biblical Moses.
Bar-Ron told The Humble Skeptic he'd been studying the site for eight years and claimed to have found two instances of the name 'Moses' who promoted worship of a being called 'El' (a Northwest Semitic word meaning 'god'), and faced a cult of a gold cow-goddess named 'Ba'alat'.
Other carvings which he suggests say 'zot m'Moshe' would translate as 'this is from Moses'.
In the Bible when Moses pops up to Mount Sinai (which is around the same part of the world as Serabit el-Khadim) to receive the 10 commandments he's quite dismayed to discover that while he was gone the Israelites made a statue of a golden cow and started worshipping it.
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He was gone for forty days and nights, which is a decent amount of time but still a bit quick to be erecting false idols and whatnot, and once Moses got back he burned the statue, ground the remains into powder and made the worshippers drink it.
So if Bar-Ron's translations of the carvings are right then it's somewhat close to the story from Exodus and points towards the historicity of Moses.
The researcher said: "As soon as it becomes a Masters and PhD thesis, it will be reviewed critically by those whose opinions count, and I’ll need to defend it.
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"As we speak, it is now being reviewed by my new academic advisor who will help me develop the material into theses according to the expectations and standards of Ariel University."
However, according to the Daily Mail, not everyone is convinced by this potential discovery as they say a fellow named Dr Thomas Schneider, an Egyptologist from the University of British Columbia, said this supposed decoding of the carvings was 'completely unproven and misleading'.
He warned that 'arbitrary' interpretations of ancient letters when we're not certain what they say can change the way people view history and ancient times.
Who knows what happened all that time ago? Perhaps we'll never find out for sure.
Topics: History, Weird, Archaeology
Joe Harker