Bill Maher, Jr. has been living with an enigma for about thirty years. The ancient bronze cup with mysterious inscriptions occupies his desk at home, serving as an improvised pencil holder. Maher found the artifact as a boy, cutting firewood in the hills outside Wurtsboro, NY. The unique object was discovered inside an old tree, which had grown around it.
“We moved to Wurtsboro from Rockland County, I was eight years old,” Maher recalls. About a year later, his dad got a wood stove, and they went up on the slope of Shawanga Mountain to cut down some dead trees. “My dad was chain sawing them into logs, the thing came flying out of the tree, nearly hit me in the head.”
Maher’s father, Bill Sr., thinking it was an ordinary piece of pipe, instructed his son to throw the metal scrap away. “I picked it up and it was all green, but heavy, and was like ‘wow, maybe it’s gold.’” Disobeying dad’s instructions, the youngster put the urn in the pocket of his winter jacket. “I hid it in my underwear drawer, probably for about five years.”
Although heavily corroded, the artwork of a dragon was clearly visible, along with indecipherable writing on the bottom. “It was just like the neatest thing,” Maher remembers, “it was so cool.” Eventually, Maher’s parents learned about their son’s strange antique.
Bill’s parents contacted a local archaeological group to examine the specimen. The cup was studied for about six months, and returned. “He couldn’t find anything out,” Maher lamented, “but when he gave it back it was clean, it wasn’t green anymore. He had taken all the patina off.”
“And I’ve had it ever since,” Maher concluded. “It’s never left my side. I’ve done all the research I could do, reading about every possible culture, right down the Dewey Decimal System. But I could never find out what it said on the bottom. Every effort I made was always a dead end.”
Other ancient objects have been found in the same region, although not at this exact location. A bronze urn with Carthaginian motif was discovered near Binghamton, NY in 1973, dated to approx. 1500 BC. The existence of pre-Columbian bronze artifacts in America tends to confirm theories proposed by historian Fred Rydholm, author of Michigan Copper: The Untold Story — that the Bronze Age was supplied by Old World mariners visiting North America during biblical times.
Another related hypothesis claims that US Rt. 209 — considered the oldest highway in North America — was not built by the Dutch in the 1600s as commonly believed, but rather represents part of an ancient copper trade with Europe from thousands of years ago. There is evidence which points in that direction.
Rt. 209, formerly called “The Old Mine Road,” begins in Pennsylvania near East Stroudsburg, right across the Delaware River from Pahaquarry, NJ – the site of an ancient copper mine. The road heads northeast for just over a hundred miles, ending at the Hudson River in Kingston, NY. Along the way, the highway passes directly through Wurtsboro, NY.
An old lead mine is located right where Maher’s bronze urn was found. Known by native tribes, the lead vein was kept secret from colonists until about 1820. In addition, numerous carved tunnels appear up and down Rt. 209, dug with pick and wedge, indicating a possible ancient mining operation. Colonists like the Dutch used modern black powder to blast their mines; and the Native Americans were not known to work with metal at all.
Upon close scrutiny, the Dutch origin of Rt. 209 disintegrates. Henry Hudson discovered the area in 1609. Kingston, the Hudson River terminus of Rt. 209 (then called Wiltwyk or Esopus), was settled in 1652. It’s ludicrous to think the Dutch settlers would build a highway 100 miles south to Pahaquarry, through hostile frontier country, for purposes of copper mining. Logically the road would need to begin on the southern end, working the mine first. Merely a handful of agricultural Dutch families resided in Port Jervis (Maghaghkamik) at the time, about two-thirds the way down from Esopus.
Up until the early 1800s, the Old Mine Road marked the western boundary of America’s frontier; white settlers ventured there only at risk of being scalped. Plus, no records exist of road construction or industrial mining along Rt. 209. By contrast, the 1801 establishment of the Newburgh-Cocheton Turnpike, a plank road heading east-west through the same area, is well documented.
It is in this context that special attention is drawn upon archaeological bronze artifacts discovered in North America.
Looking at Maher’s urn, it features an ornate dragon wrapped around the side, in traditional Chinese artistic style. Several squiggly lines surrounding the dragon represent water and fire – although they could easily be misinterpreted for proto-Canaanite script. Characters etched on the bottom of the cup similarly resemble proto-Canaanite.
However, Donal B. Buchanan, editor of the Epigraphic Society Occasional Papers, identified the writing as old style Chinese. “The inscription is very clear and shows two Chinese characters in an ancient script-form dating back as much as 1500 years or more,” Buchanan confirmed. He cited as his reference Ueda’s Daijiten , a major Japanese dictionary of Sino-Japanese characters. “Each character has two elements side by side, a Radical (clue to the meaning) and a Phonetic (clue to the pronunciation). It is probably the name of the artist who created the urn. In this case the artist’s name is JEN LI.”
On the other hand, it is doubtful that a “Chinaman” working on the nearby O&W Railroad, or its predecessor Delaware & Hudson Canal, left the bronze object behind. “The Erie (preceding the Midland, corporate predecessor to the NYO&W) employed Irish and Italian laborers,” states Malcolm Houck, Publications Editor for the Ontario & Western Railroad Historical Society, citing “well documented fighting and battling between the distinct ethnic groups.”
Houck notes nearby Black Rock Cut (northwest of Port Jervis), ”the fighting and conflict became so intense that it acquired the moniker of the ‘Shin Hollow War’ and the Deer Park militia had to be mobilized to put down the strife.” Instead, Chinese labor was utilized towards the westernmost parts of the Transcontinental Railroad — not in Wurtsboro, NY.
“Chinese worked the western end of the Spokane, Portland & Seattle, as one of the last of the Western rail lines built (last leg of the last Transcon),” said Houck. “Their work through the Cascades was slower than the work of the Irishmen working from the East and the Irish were laid off while the Chinese were still working. The Irish descended on the Chinese encampments and beat and killed many Chinese laborers in their frustration and antagonism.”
Furthermore, Chinese labor was not probable along the old D&H Canal. “Most of the 19th Century canals were constructed with laborers recruited from the immediate localities through which they passed… although that was primarily for digging and earth moving — well within the capabilities of local rural (agricultural) folks,” Houck observes.
“This urn is inherently interesting,” said author Salvatore Michael Trento, who has been studying pre-Columbian artifacts for 35 years. “However, on a framework of analysis, it has to be an anomaly, because there’s only one Chinese urn.” Trento is a contemporary of the famous epigrapher Dr. Barry Fell (author of America B.C.: Ancient Settlers in the New World). Trento himself penned several important references including: Field Guide to Mysterious Places of Eastern North America; and The Search for Lost America: The Mysteries of the Stone Ruins. Trento also happens to be the person who the Maher family contacted 30 years ago to interpret the urn. Billy Maher had forgotten the archaeologist’s name, but they were reunited during the writing of this article.
“Where did it come from? It’s hard to know,” Trento admits. “It could be ancient — but then again, you find ancient bronze artifacts all over the Catskills, that were brought over during the Grand European Tour. Oriental art was very popular in this country from the 1870s to about the 1920s. Many mansions that you find along the Hudson Valley, you will find evidence of Tiffany using oriental motifs; Orientalism was a huge event at the time. That particular urn is intriguing because it’s old, it has some interesting marks and perhaps epigraphically is fascinating.”
Trento is wary over gullibility when interpreting ancient epigraphic translations, having witnessed first hand Barry Fell’s judgment errors — and subsequent tarnished credibility. “The translations are really cool, but you can go into any Chinese restaurant and see ancient inscriptions,” Trento warned. “That’s real interesting — I’m not trying to disparage anyone, but it doesn’t mean anything. You’ve got to be very careful when you find something out of context. And frankly, that’s the mistake that Barry Fell, and all the other people, when they were alive, made.”
He elaborated, “The problem with all those guys is they just took for granted what you found in the field. On one hand, it’s incredibly cool to find a rock that has markings on it, ‘oh my gosh!’ One [item] doesn’t mean anything. When you start finding more than one, and you start plotting out patterns, occupation sites, burial sites… That was the part that Barry and I used to constantly fight about, because people would send him photographs of a rock out in Colorado. He’d get this great translation – no doubt correct — but it was totally out of context.
“…And some other people sometimes would fool the guy. They would send him crap. The cowboys would send him stuff that was simply bogus. And he’d make these incredible claims, and unfortunately in the latter part of his life, he got discredited. Barry Fell was a brilliant guy, but he was too nice, and he got suckered by people who basically wanted to see this guy fail. I remember vividly being with him, we’d have these incredible knock-down arguments about protocol, and if you don’t apply protocol to what you’re finding, someone’s going to fool you, because people are just weird that way, particularly in that construct.
Based on experience, Trento urges caution with anomalous finds. “[the bronze urn] does not fit the pattern of some of the other material you find further south, which seems to be a pattern of epigraphy that pops up in that area time and time again, of the same type.” With three decades hindsight he declared,” I would love to do some more analysis on [the urn] now.”
Trento said the experts he consulted thirty years ago advised the urn was a tumbler for throwing divination sticks (similar to I Ching), based upon its size and shape. “We have the contacts now, the lab, we could figure this thing out in a heartbeat. If you really want to get into the details of that, probably would take a week these days to [find out] what it is.”
Billy Maher looks forward to finally solving the riddle which puzzled him for most of his life. By coincidence both he and Sal Trento currently reside in North Carolina. Plans are being hatched to put the artifact through state-of-the art scientific testing. A follow-up conclusion to this story might come shortly. And if there are any other mysterious bronze objects hidden within those Shawangunk Mountain backwoods, they will now be much easier to find — a recent forest fire just cleared out the entire western slope.
Robert Evan Walters lives in Mamakating, NY and publishes the online Mamakating Messenger.
