There is no reason, a priori, why a stone in Kentucky might not have writing in an Old World language, or maybe even two: the world is stranger than we know; although eight of them seems a bit much.


But when I decipher an inscription, the burden is on me to give my grounds for the decipherment: merely stating something to be a fact won't hack it, especially if it runs counter to traditional knowledge. For example: of this rather striking mark, or group of marks, our panel asserts it is a "[f]irst century Christian monogram in Hebrew and Greek letters; it means 'Jesus Christ Son of the Father' " — quite a lot to pack into that squiggle, especially when we consider that both Hebrew and Greek are alphabetic, not pictographic languages. The phrase in ancient Greek is pretty much as long as it is in English: [snip -- Greek characters] and nothing in our glyph, except the [snip]; that might be taken as the initial letter of [snip];, "Christ"; you might as well take it for a pair of crossed oars, parked here by those mariners of the Nile, so far from home. . . . The statement on the panel is just not true. Similarly, the purported Ogham "rebus" — didn't we just see a "monogram"? do we sense someone repeatedly hedging their bets? — looks nothing like Ogham (for what Ogham does look like, see this excellent page at TITUS).


Consider also how very rarely one meets with bilingual inscriptions; texts in three scripts, like that on the Rosetta Stone, are correspondingly rarer; and eight? In forty years of poking around looking at ancient inscriptions, I've never come across one nor heard of one. (Modern scholarly publications not infrequently show such a wide mix of languages or scripts, as for example in Karl Müller's magisterial edition of Ptolemy; but ancient inscriptions, whether on stone or parchment, no.)


So why do we have eight scripts proposed here? Very simply, because someone has gone fishing for them to support a preconceived notion. If this squiggle isn't Greek, well it's Ogham or "South Semitic" — this last term, by the way, covering several dozen languages modern and extinct, none of which has signs for vowels — or Punic or Runic. Worse than "not true", this is . . . boulderdash; and very likely with something of an agenda: see this page on Chief Red Bird and the petroglyphs.