by Mary Gindling

Created on: November 02, 2009

Nez Perce Chief Joseph had done his best to make peace with the white settlers steadily moving into his people's territory. But when he was ordered to move his people away from their ancestral lands, he first fought back, then tried to escape with his people to Canada. They were captured by the U.S. Army just 40 miles from the Canadian border in 1877. A search of his medicine bag created a mystery, for it contained an unusual and very ancient object. It was an ancient cuneiform tablet, measuring about one inch square.

Experts date the tablet to approximately 2400 BC and, when translated, it proved to be a bill of sale for a lamb to be used as a sacrificial offering. The question of how that tablet, created more than 4,000 years ago somewhere in the Near East, found its way to the American West has puzzled scholars and historians for nearly 150 years.

The chief said that the tablet had been passed down in his family for many generations, and that they had inherited it from their white ancestors. Chief Joseph said that white men had come among his ancestors long ago, and had taught his people many things. His story echoes those told by Native Americans in both North and South America about white culture bringers. But in this case, Joseph had a souvenir to demonstrate the truth of his story.

There are several puzzling things about Chief Joseph's tablet. Cuneiform tablets were still relatively rare in 1877, especially in the American West. It is highly unlikely that some acquaintance of the Nez Perce chief would have had such an object to begin with and, if so, Joseph certainly would have said so. Chief Joseph was a man of honor. He would have had little to gain by saying that his family had possessed the tablet for many generations if, in fact, he had gotten it from some missionary or trader.

The mundane nature of the contents of the tablet argues against forgery. Cuneiform had only been deciphered in 1846 and the process was far from complete even in 1877, so a would-be forger would have had to be an extremely well educated individual familiar not only with the ancient language itself, but with the shape of the tablets created by the ancient scribes.

Perhaps it was the presence of this mysterious object that led Joseph and his father to work so hard to establish good relations with their white neighbors. The memory of the white strangers who came among his people and apparently taught them might well have influenced their attitude toward the influx of white men moving in among them, causing them to trust the whites even in the face of the treachery that cost them their homelands.

The ancient tablet now resides in the museum at West Point in Virginia. How it got to America is still a mystery.

Selected Sources:

http://www.science-frontiers.com/sf007/sf007p01.htm

http://planetvermont.com/pvq/v9n2/megaliths.html

http://www.juntosociety.com/native/nezperce.htm

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