28 ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE UNITED STATES. 



of whom, in Phoenician ships, coasted the Mediterranean to its mouth ; as appears 

 from the inscription they left there in the ancient Phoenician letter, viz : "We are 

 they who fled from the face of Joshua the robber, the son of Nun." From thence he 

 supposes they crossed the Atlantic, driven by the trade-winds, and commenced the 

 settlement of Mexico and Peru. Another branch of the same people, be inferred, 

 might travel northeastward, become the Tartars of that part of Asia, and finally, 

 passing over to America, constitute the sachemdoms of the northern regions of this 

 continent. 1 



This appears to be an independent opinion of President Stiles, as he does not 

 refer to those early writers (Gomara, De Lery, Lescarbot, &c.) who derived the 

 population of certain portions of this country from the Canaanites, though upon 

 different grounds; but he strengthens his view with the judgment of M. Gebelin, of 

 the Paris Academy of Sciences, who had pronounced the characters on the Dighton 

 rock to be Punic (as M. Jomard has since decided those on the Grave creek stone 

 to be Lybian), and interpreted them as denoting that the ancient Carthaginians 

 once visited these distant regions. 



Aboriginal monuments are rare in New England ; but her scholars did not fail 

 to observe and investigate such as were found. A copy of the inscription on the 

 Dighton rock was made by Rev. Mr. Danforth, as early as 1680. In 1712, Cot- 

 ton Mather sent a very rude and incorrect drawing of the same to the Royal 

 Society. The Professor of Hebrew in Harvard College, Stephen Sewall, made, in 

 1768, the first copy that bears any near resemblance to those of recent date; and 

 another was taken, with special care, by Professor James Winthrop, in 1788. The 

 last two delineations are those which reminded Washington of what he had seen 

 in his youth, while carrying the surveyor's chain through western forests." 



President Stiles was active in the examination of American inscriptions. He 

 visited an inscribed rock at a place in Connecticut called by the Indians Scaticook, 

 took full sized drawings of some of the characters, and wrote an account of it in 

 1789. He also collected accounts of sculptures that had been noticed in other 

 parts of the country, viz : on the south shore of Lake Erie, observed by the mis- 

 sionary Kirkland ; on the Alleghany river, below Venango, visited in 1789 by Mr. 

 Frothingham ; and others in Brattleboro' Vt., on the Alatamaha in Georgia, and 

 on Cumberland river in Kentucky. In 1790, he prepared an account of a stone 

 bust, supposed to have been an Indian god, which had been found the year before, 



1 The story of the inscription is derived from Procopius, the Greek historian, a native of Palestine, 

 who says that he saw and read it at Tangier, on two marble pillars, in the ancient Phoenician character. 



3 An account of the Dighton rock, and the various conjectures and speculations to which it has given 

 rise, would Gil a volume by itself. Since 1680, copies have continued to be taken by different 

 methods, each aiming to be more accurate than others. These are often widely diverse from one 

 another, and no two of them are precisely alike. The construction given to the inscription by the 

 Scandinavian antiquaries is well known. It is not as well known, perhaps, that the now commonly 

 received opinion, that it is the work of the native Indians, was expressed by Gen. Washington, at Cam- 

 bridge, in IT 89. He remarked to Dr. Lathrop, who visited the college with him, that he had 

 repeatedly noticed similar inscriptions in the Indian country, in early life, which were unquestionably 

 executed by the natives. — Memoirs of Am. Acad, of Arts and Sciences, III, 205. 



