An American explorer says that he has found three ancient stone tablets in Peru's highland jungle that may prove the area was the site of King Solomon's legendary gold mines.
The explorer, Gene Savoy, said in an interview the tablets contain the first writing found from the ancient civilizations of the Andes and that the inscriptions are similar to Phoenician and Semitic hieroglyphs.John Rick, an archaeologist at Stanford University who has worked in Peru for 15 years, said he was highly skeptical of Savoy's claim.
"It would seem unlikely to me," he said in a telephone interview. "A wild guess I could make is that it may be some sort of a petroglyph commonly done by the people of the Amazon. It can almost look like writing. . . .
"What would strike me as odd about it is we would have three very large stone tablets engraved with hieroglyphs in an area otherwise devoid of anything of the type."
Savoy, on the other hand, said the find could be extremely valuable. "We have found something that is going to revolutionize the archaeological interpretation of Peru's ancient civilizations," he said.
Peru's pre-Colombian cultures, which culminated with the Incas, were not known to have written languages, said Savoy, 62, a member of the New York Explorers Club.
Savoy said he found three tablets, each weighing several tons and measuring about 5 by 10 feet, in August in a cave near Gran Vilaya, the immense ruins of the Chachapoyas Indian civilization he discovered in 1985.
The Gran Vilaya ruins are 400 miles north of Lima and 9,000 feet above sea level in a fog-shrouded region of the Andes that Peruvians call the "jungle's eyebrow."
Savoy displayed photos of the tablets, which he said remain in the cave, and sketches of rubbings taken from the stones. He pointed out the similarities between the stylized inscriptions and samples of Phoenician hier-oglyphs.
The hieroglyphs on the tablets are similar to those used in King Solomon's time and include one identical to the symbol that always appeared on the ships he sent to the legendary land of Ophir, which the Bible described as the source of his gold, Savoy said.
"When I first heard about the possible contact between Egypt and Israel and the Americas, nobody was more skeptical than I was," he said. "I thought it was absolutely ridiculous. They've been talking about this crazy stuff for years.
"But now we've got stone tablets and this cannot be denied." Savoy, who has written books on his explorations in Peru, said he has studied his findings since early September and is preparing to publish them.
"The tablets were not brought here from another country like Egypt. This is a Chachapoyas form of hieroglyphic writing," he said, referring to the Indian empire that once dominated the jungle region.
"We're talking about something very old. It's possible the Andean cultures . . . are much older than we realize, perhaps older than what we know as the Old World," Savoy said.