The Newton Stone is a pillar stone, found in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. The stone contains two inscriptions: one is written in Ogham, but the second script has never been positively identified and many different decipherments or theories have been proposed since the 1860s. The second script may have been added to the stone as recently as the late 18th or beginning of the 19th century.
Discovery and relocation
The Newton Stone has been known since 1804 when the Earl of AberdeenGeorge Hamilton-Gordon discovered the stone by the opening up of a new road near Pitmachie Farm, Aberdeenshire, after local shepherds told him of a "curious monument" that sat there. The stone was later taken and planted in the garden of Newton House, in the Parish of Culsamond about a mile north of Pitmachie Farm by the antiquarian Alexander Gordon. Gordon was later indebted by the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland for writing a letter describing the original position of the Newton Stone. His letter reads: In 1883, James Carnegie clarified that the stone was "moved to a site behind Newton House about 1837".
Inscriptions
The Newton Stone contains two inscriptions. The first is an Ogham script possibly containing personal names, while the second has never been identified and became known from the early 19th century as the "unknown script". The Ogham script is engraved down the left-hand side of the stone and runs across part of its face. There are two rows of Ogham, a long and a short row. Across the top third of the stone, roughly central, is the unidentified script which contains 6 lines comprising 48 characters and symbols, including a swastika.
Age
The Ogham inscription is ancient, but dates to Late Antiquity. Scholars have considered the possibility the unknown inscription was added a century or more after the Ogham. William Forbes Skene dated the unknown inscription to the 9th century. It has also been proposed the "unknown script" is a modern forgery.
Decipherment theories
first published the engravings of the Newton Stone in his Inquiry into the History of Scotland yet made no attempt to decipher the "unknown script". In 1821-1822, John Stuart, Professor of Greek at Marischal College, discussed the stone in his paper entitled "Sculpture Pillars in the Northern Part of Scotland" addressed to the Edinburgh Society of Antiquaries. According to Stuart, the first attempt at translation was by Charles Vallancey who fancied resemblance of the characters to Latin. In 1856, Stuart published Sculptured Stones of Scotland which mentions that William Mill from Cambridge University proposed the script was Phoenician. No other theories had been proposed at that time. It was apparently George Hamilton-Gordon's son Arthur who first took drawings of the stone to Cambridge, where Mill studied them: Therefore, a heated debate at Cambridge took place in 1862 regarding the decipherment, when Thomas Wright criticized Mill's Phoenician theory, for a more simple Latin translation: "Here lies Constantinus, the son of". Wright's translation was supported by the palaeographer Simonides but who substituted the Latin for Greek. Dr. Mill had died in 1853, but his paper "On the Decipherment of the Phoenician Inscription on the Newton Stone discovered in Aberdeenshire" was read out during the debate. His translation was: In 1865 the antiquarian Alexander Thomson read a paper to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland addressing five decipherment theories:
Phoenician
Gaelic
Latin
Greek
Gnostic symbolism
Additionally, George Moore proposed a Hebrew-Bactrian translation, while Thomson mentions another scholar who likened the unknown inscription to Sinaitic. The more eccentric or fanciful decipherments such as Phoenician or Hebrew were soon rejected for Latin or Gaelic: According to the Scottish historian William Forbes Skene: In 1907, William Bannerman, developed Skene's theory that the inscription contains Old Irish: Laurence Waddell however as late as 1924 offered another radical decipherment as Hitto-Phoenician. His work was strongly criticized.
Possible forgery
In 1935, R. A. Stewart Macalister, while accepting the Ogham as ancient, considered the "unknown script" a modern forgery: He also wrote: The archaeologist C. A. Gordon however in 1956 disputed Macalister's claim: W. Douglas Simpson also rejected Macalister's assertion the unknown inscription was modern.
