Saga of Burrows Cave: Egyptian Artifacts in America?
By Paul White of Australia, 1997
A bizarre
collection [of artifacts] was found in a remote cave system in the American
State of Illinois. The cavers who made the discovery encountered a derisive
response from the first academic experts they approached, experiencing a lot of
difficulty finding necessary specialists to help them document and identify the
artifacts. There were problems of site security, disappearing artifacts, as well
as people bending data to suit their personal agendas. As the site researcher
Fred Rydholm remarks: "For this kind of research you have to be
thick-skinned, brave or crazy!" It's one thing finding these things, its
quite another to explain them.
In the
United States the saga of "Burrows Cave" has been going on for well
over a decade. Over three thousand rock fragments, engraved with a variety of
ancient drawings, hieroglyphs and script, were presented to the world by Russell
Burrows in 1982, who discovered them in a cave system in Southern Illinois. The
story of the cave and its contents is so strange, that it's little wonder it has
met strong skepticism. Recently deciphered for the first time, the stone tablets
tell such a wild tale that it will require quite a turn around to accepted
history. I was stunned into disbelief when I first laid eyes on the Burrows Cave
evidence. This is no straight forward set of hieroglyphs but, an inexplicable
display of several cultures, a huge library preserved on stone tablets,
collected together and sealed in a cave sometime around the first millennium.
The first
photographs of the artifacts were forwarded to me by Filip Coppens, who writes
about world mysteries in Belgium. He had heard about my investigation of the
anomalies surrounding the presumed hoax of Egyptian hieroglyphs in the NSW
Hunter Valley. He was struck by certain odd similarities between the two finds
and sent pictures of the carvings which depicted a wolf-headed god, similar to
an "Anubis" carving photographed in the Hunter Valley.
Certainly,
the Burrows Cave boasts a few forms of wolf and jackal-headed deities, from the
classical Anubis to half human versions. One of the Burrows Cave examples is
executed in bas-relief, with accompanying hieroglyphs, embossed on a gold plate.
However, there is much more than wolf-headed deities, the carved tablets display
an extraordinary cultural array. There is a hodgepodge mixture of images and
cultural influences which make the artifacts very hard to explain. Even worse,
some of the carvings seem amateurish or dimly remembered copies of ancient Greek
and Mesopotamian sources.
Whereas,
others involve a high level of skill and obvious knowledge of ancient cosmology.
One of the images depicts a "wolfish" deity in priestly regalia,
wearing a bishop-style hat decorated with a solar emblem. The deity has been
identified as the god "So-Bek-Ra", who is so pictured on a temple by
the Nile. The figure stands, as the lone representative of an ancient
priesthood, against an advancing enemy army. There are also many carved heads,
mostly warrior profiles, wearing both Greek, Roman and Egyptian headgear.
Curiously,
there are even images of ancient Amer-Indians wearing feathers and facial
designs, some showing clear Meso-American style head-dress. Records of ancient
travellers? Amongst them are many ancient mystical and sacred designs, as well
as maps, pictures of ships and non-indigenous animals. Astonishingly, one of the
carvings portrays the cloven-hooved god Pan, holding his pipes and consorting
with a nymph. Another stone (as well as an ancient metal coin) excavated from
the cave carry the bold image of an elephant underlined with Hebrew characters.
Oddly, an
artifact inscribed in exactly the same way was found on a pyramid-shaped stone
in Ecuador some years earlier. Some of the carvings are meticulously executed in
full bas-relief, some completely carved into the shapes of animals and deities,
while other tablets were etched to render the designs. Even a small collection
of solid gold artifacts and coins have been excavated. More than just pictures,
there are numerous tablets with coherent linear script carved on them. Examples
and influences appear to range from Hebrew and Sumerian to Roman, Greek and
Egyptian.
In my
correspondence with Fred Rydholm, the best theory I could offer, was to
speculate about a colony of resourceful pirates, who in some distant time,
raided and collected the strange quasi-cultural cache of artifacts for
themselves. Together with an associate Dr James Scherz, who helped in the study
and documentation of the artifacts, Fred Rydholm found correlations between
symbols on the Burrows Cave coins and coins produced by dynasties along the
"Silk Road" between China and Rome, the most predominant being "Kushana"
and "Satavahana"symbols. ( NOTE: The Kushanas once controlled a trade
dynasty along the Silk Roads, uniting various ancient people's in the days of
the Romans. They disintegrated with the collapse of the Western part of the
Roman Empire about AD 300.
The
Satavahana's were a seafaring people who lived on the coast of the Indian Ocean
and had large ships represented on their coins before they collapsed around
210-230 AD. This suggests the likely time period of early in the first
millennium around or after 200 AD. ) Finally, Fred Rydholm was able to report a
significant breakthrough with two young Florida researchers, Paul Schaffranke
and Brian Hubbard, who were successful in deciphering some of the inscriptions.
Schaffranke and Hubbard recognised them as being one of several ancient Etruscan
alphabets which could be translated into "street Latin", as used
around the time of Christ. T
he two
Florida men were able to translate stone tablets from the Burrows Cave that the
great epigrapher, Dr. Barry Fell and others, had insisted were gibberish and
could not be translated. Mixed in amongst the Etruscan script there is also the
added mystery of Hebrew and Egyptian stone tablets. These were also recently
identified and are being translated by Dr. Arnold Murray of Arkansas and, Zena
Halpern, a Hebrew scholar from New York. The Egyptian material is still being
assessed. Over half a dozen professional archeologists and linguists have now
examined the collection and have been definite in their support of the
artifacts' authenticity.
At last
contact, the Burrow's team had dug out and classified an astonishing four
thousand stone tablets. Another breakthrough came, when a retired engineer Bill
Kreisle, found several of the stones recorded accurate maps of the Mississippi
River system as it appeared 2000 years ago. Another map stone shows a river on
the Iberian Peninsula (Spain) with the ancient city of Cadiz near its mouth.
But, most astonishing of all, they have reported the discovery of several stone
crypts, excavated from limestone deep in the cave system, containing a number of
interred skeletons with jewellery, artifacts and statuary.
The mystery
people who left the cache of records are, apparently, themselves, buried there.
The biggest continuing mystery of the discovery is, WHO carved all these message
tablets and from whence came this hidden dynasty of bodies? Fred Rydholm, who
works with and writes, for the retiring Col. Burrows, reports in his recent
correspondence : "Although I speak with caution, as it is still too early
to say for sure, there are many indications that the bodies found in the crypts
are the leaders of a colony of refugees from Ptolemaic Egypt, including a Jewish
contingent from the Roman controlled Kingdom of Mauritania.
Dr Joseph
Mahan, founder and longtime president of the Institute for the Study of American
Cultures (ISAC), has examined the evidence from the new translations and
presents this interesting scenario: "They were secretly sent to America in
ships provided by the Mauritanian King Juba the Second and his wife Cleopatra
Selene, daughter of Cleopatra and Marc Anthony. Included among the refugees were
the Queen's two brothers, who disappeared from Rome (and recorded history) in 17
AD, Ptolemy Philadelphus and Alexander Helios."
The graves
of these people have been the object of a comprehensive historical search for
the past two thousand years. We appear to have an advanced and well funded group
of priest/scholars who, with the ex-Royal families, escaped the Roman
Christianisation of Egypt and set off into the unknown somewhere around 200-300
AD. The engraved maps and their collected storehouse of knowledge, shows a
deliberate transplanting of culture, perhaps to escape the religious persecution
of the Roman Invasion of Egypt and establish a remote colony which could
preserve the ancient records.
Indeed, Dr
Joseph Mahan, an archeological anthropologist who made a close study of the cave
artifacts, reveals a detailed cosmology and religious lore from the cave
material which is remarkably similar to that which survived amongst the Indian
tribes of the area. The area of Southern Illinois and Indiana, where Russell
Burrows stumbled into the limestone cave system, is richly endowed with the
scattered evidence of several different early cultures which archeologists know
too little about.
There are
log tombs, skeletons and artifacts from the Adena culture, which is believed to
have developed around 500 BC and to have died out by 200 AD. There was the
Hopewell culture, 100 BC to 350 AD. A mysterious culture concentrated along the
Mississippi, known as the "Mississippian", crystalised around 800 AD,
and was thought to still be in existence when the Spaniards arrived. Researcher,
Joseph Mahan, points out, that archeologists have collected evidence for fifty
years of an elaborate and uniform Earth/Sun religion, associated with the
building of flat top temple mounds, which spread out from the Mississippi in the
later part of the first millennium.
These
pyramid-like mounds, which carried a permanent fire at the top, contained a
variety of art, impressed on copper and stone, depicting animal-headed deities,
crosses, swastikas, and people in ceremonial dress performing rituals. Examples
of these mound sites are spread from Oklahoma, to Illinois, Alabama and Georgia.
Could the Burrows Cave, indeed, be the lost library and resting place of the
founders of this mysterious culture? Founders, the inscribed tablets purport to
be, the ex-Egyptian Royal family escaping the sacking of ancient Egypt early in
the first millennium?