For an idea of its actual size, in relation to a human hand, refer to the picture at the end of this article,
    accompanied by an artificial account of the artifact, made by an artless artificial intelligence

                      https://www.academia.edu/8240903/Huron_Stone
                            https://www.academia.edu/8241055/Huron_Stone_Presentation

This stone was found on the south-west shore of Lake Huron in Michigan; Kevin Callaghan, the finder of this relic, contacted me in 2009  and asked whether I could read the inscription. Its significance eluded me at that time, and I was thinking it was connected with the culture of the local indigenous people. In November 2021, Kevin pleaded with me to look at it again, and with those additional years of experience behind me, and with the picture the right way up, I recognized the script immediately. The murky  photograph at the top shows my work in progress: the signs are syllabograms (consonant + vowel) of the West Semitic Proto-syllabary. This writing system is associated with the Phoenician city of Byblos (Gubla, now Jibeil in Lebanon). It flourished in the Mediterranean Bronze Age (3rd - 2nd Millennium BCE), so this artefact shows that Mediterranean seafarers had crossed the Atlantic Ocean three thousand years before Columbus.
   Looking at the shorter inscription, which meanders around on the side of the stone that was face down when Kevin discovered it on the seashore: the vertical column of four letters (on the left) was my starting point: I recognized NA (cobra) BU (reed) LA (night); like most of the characters in this syllabary, these letters were Egyptian hieroglyphs of the Old Kingdom, borrowed for the purpose of writing West Semitic language (Canaanian, Phoenician, Israelian Hebrew); the acrophonic principle was applied in that process: the WS word for snake is nakhash, and by the technique of acrophony ("top sound principle") the first syllable is pronounced when the snake-sign appears, hence NA; and most of the original letters (consonantograms) of the Proto-alphabet were already in the Proto-syllabary, and by the same principle the first consonant of nakhash is read, hence N; the Greco-Roman letter N still shows its serpentine form; incidentally, in the syllabary and the consonantary, the snake-sign could stand for the whole word, as a logogram; and as a rebus (rebogram) it could represent another word with the same consonants, in this case N-Kh-Sh "copper" (highly relevant in this Michigan setting, it transpires, and I think there is an example of this on the other side of the stone).
    At this preliminary stage of the investigation, I can only seek to identify the various syllabograms (I have pencilled in my suggestions for many of them); it remains to be determined whether this is a text with a message, or a catalogue of the signs.
    We can begin with the sequence NABULA: the root N-B-L has several references in Hebrew and other Semitic languages; Nabal ("noble" or "fool") was the name of the husband of Abigail, who became one of David's wives; nbl was a jar; for example, a fragment of a pithos from Knossos in Crete (KN Zb 20) has the remains of a Linear A Semitic inscription ]na-a-ba[; but in Hebrew the vowels are nébèl; it is nbl in the Ugaritic cuneiform consonantal script, with no vowels shown; and another nablu  is "flame" in Babylonia, and Ugarit (nbl).     
    The next letter, following NA-BU-LA seems to be a face, panu, hence PA, and this could say "and" or "here"; perhaps the stone marked the spot where a jar of liquid (water or wine) or a flame (for melting copper) was in place. If this nbl was a storage jar (or more than one amphora), its position beside the lake provided fresh water for it, as the Great Lakes still do for America and Canada. In the Bible,  nébèl was a vessel for oil and wine, but proof that it could store water is found in Job 38:37, where clouds are jars of heaven, which pour out their water onto the land.
    The jar or jars mentioned in the text on the stone could be containers for fresh water fit for drinking, it behoves us to search for possible references to these things.                                  
    (At this point I have tried repeatedly but unsuccessfully to insert pictures of the stone here, but they always go to the top of the page, and so you will have to continually scroll up to them, or take a photograph of them on your phone; or have two copies of this page on your screen. As I continue writing, I will be looking at several pictures that Kevin has sent to me. I also need to apologize to you for blinding you with science and signs. If you do not already have some idea of what I am talking about, you will probably not understand what I am saying.)
    We begin our water-divining quest in the horizontal lines at the bottom (the angular part of the stone), assuming that the text has taken a turn to the right. An exclamation "Eureka" would be appropriate here, upon sighting the middle sign of the three!  The letter M in the alphabet has its ultimate origin in the Egyptian hieroglyph for "water" (N35), represented by a series  of waves, /\/\/\/\/\.  This was borrowed for the syllable MU in the Protosyllabary that is confronting us here in our analysis, and it was ultimately reduced to two waves, /\/\, the letter M, to signify /m/, in the Phoenician and Greco-Roman alphabets. In the present case, we could assume that the water-sign is acting as a logogram, designating the concept "water"; the three dots below it might indicate that, but I have not seen an analogy for such a practice; there is also an ink-spot above it; examples of one  dot or two dots are extant, for doubling consonants; a pair of doubling dots above a Q is found in a Thebes inscription (--o-: vertically), to turn ZQ into ZQQ, "refine", a verb we shall see on the other side of the Huron Stone, but written syllabically with two different signs (-QAQI).
    Next to the water-sign, on its right, is the syllabogram that we met in the vertical column, but here it is in a horizontal pose; it is a representation of the mysterious Egyptian hieroglyph for "night" (N2), and acrophonically it says LA, from Semitic layl ("night"). It could be the West Semitic preposition l-, meaning "to" or "for"; we shall see that it occurs as lu in line 5 on the other side, in the combination "copper for refining", and it would be nice if the scribe had indeed written "water for drinking" here. Wishes can come true, "when you wish upon a star". (I have had those words in my brain for 80 years, but I have never activated them, and I trust I do not have to pay royalties to Disney for using them here.) The star we have to follow is that source of light in our own solar system. In the next line there is another species of snake, which acts as guardian to the sun, and I will now attempt to distinguish three forms (and we really need the photographs handy, to follow the threads).
    (1) An apparent example of a serpent occurs at the top of the tablet: the presumed neck is raised, and the rest of the body is curved, almost angular; but I suspect that it is too exaggerated for NA; it could be a stylized and simplified version of the bee-sign (NU), which is troublesome to draw with all its details included (antennae, head, striped body, wings, legs); the NA-sign in our word NABULA has the typical shape of Egyptian hieroglyph I12. Whether it is a snake or a bee, it will represent a syllable with N, either NA or else NU.
    (2) The NaKhaSh sign denoting "copper" (see the second sign on the right in line 5 of the text on the reverse side) is different, as the head is at ground-level, and the body is semi-circular; this copper rebus also occurs on the Jamaica cup, and in Sinai 352.
    (3) Here at the bottom of the inscription, this type of serpent has a semi-circular body but its head and neck are upright. Failure to recognize this as a symbol of the sun is the downfall of my fellow workers who follow the consensus paradigm, devised by W. F. Albright in 1966 and promulgated in 2006 by Gordon Hamilton. The word for sun is shimsh, hence the syllabogram SHI here, and the cosonantogram Sh in the proto-alphabet; this truth is not acknowledged by my worthy colleagues, who are blinded by prejudice (or perhaps avoidance of gazing at the sun causes them to overlook it); this connection was not recognized by Albright, or any of the other great scholars in this field. The snake is an uraeus serpent, seen protruding from the foreheads of gods and royals, and most notably from the sun-disc of Ra`; sometimes there are two of these cobras embracing the sun; in the present instance the disc is omitted; sometimes the disc alone is presented for SHI or Sh; thus it has a variety of forms, and this is one reason why it has eluded detection; another reason is that the preferred sun-sign in the Sinai proto-alphabetic inscriptions is the double-uraeus without the disc, roughly (/\), which resembles its companion piece SHA and Th, from shad/thad ("breast"), \/\/, which was the sole survivor in the neo-consonantary for Sh, and in the neo-syllabary in three stances for the three vowels, then Sh (Shin and Sin) in the Phoenician alphabet, and then Sigma in the Hellenic alphabet, and S in the Roman alphabet. Albright failed to notice this pair, and thrust a composite bow (*thann) into the mêlée (though none of the examples really resemble a bow); Hamilton (231-244) has simply ignored my identifications, and wielded a single thorn against them (123-126), thus leaving a triangular figure in Sinai 357 as "the only certain (!) writing" of the letter Sh; but it is not a thorn (*shawt), it is actually a Delta form of D, in the word kd (jar, water-container), used for watering the gn (garden) near the mine.
    It is a sad and sorry situation, and the casualties in this battle of sharp objects (arrows and thorns) against fiery serpents and bare breasts are manifold. Nevertheless, we have before us a version of the syllable-sign SHI, with the serpent depicted and the sun-disc omitted. Also, the letter preceding the M in this horizontal sequence has roughly the shape of E, which originated from the sign of a jubilating person (>-E), evoking the root HLL, "exult", as in Hallelu-Yah, and the word hillulu, producing syllabic HI and consonantal H; in this case the body would have been omitted, though this was unusual in the Bronze Age; and so SHA is an alternative choice for this, though the regular form was \/\/ for SHA (from shad, breast) and Th (from thad, breast).
    A very early protoconsonantal inscription from the Wadi el-Hol in the Egyptian desert, near Thebes, has  both of these glyphs (O_o, and \/\/ vertical), and the first sequence of letters is MShT; everyone knows M (here with nine strokes as water-waves) and T (a cross), but the sun-sign blinded even the Egyptologist who made the discovery, and who should have recognized it; actually, this could be read as two words, "water" (M) and "drinking" (ShT), and "drinking-water" is precisely what we are hoping to see on our stone; but the rest of that text shows that it will be wine (wn) that is drunk at the celebration of the goddess `Anat (named and pictured), and MShT means "drinking place" or "banquet". Wait a moment, glancing back at the top of the stone, I see a hook (WA from WAW) and a bee (NU), forming a single word, either NUWA or WANU (wine)!
    Here at our watering place, we have LA and SHI, and we are looking for a T- syllable (assuming that the direction has changed from dextrograde to sinistrograde) : the character before us is like a figure 5; it is not a cross, nor a vine-stand, but a musical instrument, representing TI (from tibbuttu, harp), yielding la-shiti, "for drinking".
    Our stream of Eureka's has run dry at this point, as I am at a loss to find meaning for the few marks that remain at the bottom. However, hope springs up in desperate situations, and if that obtuse angle is a boomerang, the origin of Hebrew Gimel and Greek Gamma (truly, King Tutankhamun had throwsticks and boomerangs, wooden and ivory, buried with him), and if  the following letter is  a curtailed NA (with its tail shortened by water damage), then we are looking at the word gan, a watered garden, as found in the second chapter of the Hebrew Bible (Genesis 2:8), and in Sinai 357. Furthermore, if the dot above the tailless serpent is for doubling (as mentioned earlier), and the stroke is a remnant of a T-sign, then we can accept gannat, which is another garden-word. On the other hand, this supposedly barren ground is suddenly yielding a heap of rich produce: we are now confronted with the possibility that our presumed snake is an illusion, and the marks are the remains of another TI (harp). like the one above it on the preceding line; this creates GATI, and gat is a wine-press, a vat for treading grapes, and so there might have been a vineyard in the vicinity. It is certainly a fact of history that wherever the Semites went, the grapevine accompanied them, and this practice has continued in the Judeo-Christian traditions. Thus, we now seem to see flagons (plural) of water and wine, which the ancients certainly drank as a mixture.
(17/11/2023) STOP PRESS!
    Line 7 is best interpreted as RI (leg) NA (snake) NI (tusk). Profitable comparison may be made with two other wine vessels where the root RNN occurs (meaning "exult, excite, exhilarate, inebriate"), or RNY ("shout or sing for joy"); the  copper cup from Jamaica has WANU TIRUNI, and a wine jug inscription (wrongly interpreted by Christopher Rollston as LBNYW, "for BNYW, a name,  literally "son of YHWH", but the B is R, and the last letter in the sequence is G, gu "voice";  and LRNYG says:"To make the voice shout for joy".
    Accordingly, our lines 6-7 speak of wine and water "for exciting drinking". Wending our way up to the top right area of the stone (passing through an as yet incomprehensible series of dots and dashes) we actually meet the word , "wine", WANU (hook, bee); it is written from left to right, but the following line apparently runs in the opposite direction. Are there any indications to ensure that we are moving in the correct direction? Elsewhere I have found two rules to which the scribes using the Proto-syllabary (and the Proto-consonantary) generally adhered: the normal movement was from right to left (sinsistrograde), as in Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions; and characters that had heads in profile (serpentine, avian, human) looked forwards, but Egyptian hieroglyphs looked backwards (Colless 2014, The Origin of the alphabet, 81-82). In the sequence of letters at the bottom (which can be interpreted as MU LA SHI TI, "water for drinking"), the sun-serpent of SHI faces leftwards. The obscure sequence at the bottom also seems to run leftwards, so the boustrophedon may not be consistent. The ten lines on the reverse side are difficult to identify as conforming to this pattern.
    In the second line at the top of the face of the stone, the first letter on the right would be a T-syllable (whether TA or TU is still undetermined). Next comes another character made of a vertical stroke and a horizontal cross-bar, MI (a simplification of an altar); finally, two curved marks, which might be remnants of a water-sign, as encountered earlier. The total combination could thus be TAMIMU, a term known in the Bible, and meaning "perfect"; wanu tamimu  informs us that this is "fine wine", not vinegar.
    This is a seductive solution, but are the two rules being observed?  Without going into all the details, WANU would be expected to read NUWA according to the guidelines, but the WA (a hook, open at the bottom) is uncharacteristically lying on its side, with its tip pointing rightwards, and this could perhaps be the scribe's way of indicating the direction of the writing, and even a warning to the reader that the text will run in boustrophedon (zigzag) style; if so, what appears to be the third line from the top is out of step with this scheme, also apparently sinistrograde, since it has heads pointing leftwards; one desperate solution would be to allow that the real third line has been accidentally erased, and there is certainly a murky gap for it to fill; another suggestion, equally forced, would make the inscrutable vertical column on the right side began at the dot (above the prone LA), and the first two signs might say "bottle" or whatever, but the third one (level with the NA of NABULA on the left side) is another WA (faded), to be joined across a space to another NU, hence "wine" . In the subsequent sinistrograde sequence, there is a ZA (animal tail, but horizontal, instead of upright), and a ZU (human arm), and ZAZU could supply Semitic evidence for having "abundance" as its meaning.

    In summary the words of the text seem to be:
(1 >) WANU wine (or possibly WANA, if the N-glyph is a snake rather than a bee)
(2 <) TAMIMU perfect
(3 <) NU?  [?] SHI (which is?) ZAZU (abundant) NU?
(4 \/) NABULA (jar, flagon) PA (here)
(5 >) SHA (of ) MU (water) LA (for)
(6 <) SHITI (drinking)
(7 <) R-NANI (exciting, enjoyable)
    This heady mix, a cocktail of prime-quality wine and cool, clear water, can be compared and contrasted with the Jerusalem pithos, containing vinegar and water for the workers to drink, as they erected the temple of Solomon.

http://cryptcracker.blogspot.com/2013/07/jerusalem-jar-inscription.html

    On the other side of the tablet, line 5 from the top, reading from right to left, I think we can detect some old friends of mine: the copper snake from Jamaica and Sinai (S 352); and ZQQ ("refine") from Kongsberg in Norway [silver], and Thebes in Egypt [fine gold]). Reading from the right, the second  letter is a snake, possibly functioning as a logogram or a rebogram giving us the consonants N-Kh-Sh or the word n-kh-sh, "copper"; next is a side view of an eye showing the white of the eye (LUBNU), hence lu "to/for"; ZI?-QA-QI (root zqq "refine"): "Copper for refining". I should mention that the QI-sign (/|), which I understand as a wall (qir), is only attested here and at the Kongsberg silver mine. The QA-glyph is recognizable as a cord wound on a stick, with the end of the string poking out (qaw, measuring line), the letter Q/q in the alphabet.
    With further reference to line 5 on the long inscription, I want to add that the sequence apparently begins with a Z-syllabogram (vertical stance), saying "this", the same animal-tail (zanabu) as on the third line from the top of the other face of the tablet (horizontal stance). The Z-syllable in Z-QA-QI is a puzzle: if it is ZI, I have proposed its origin in ziqquratu, "ziggurat", represented as a pyramid ( []> horizontal), but the sign here might be the eyebrow-character Dh (=) of the Proto-alphabet, accompanied by an eye.
    For the remainder, we are at the mercy of the scribe's personal handwriting-style, and the stylization of the signs, and so the searching and researching continues.

  (20 September 2023). Kevin Callaghan prodded me again to study the Huron Stone more diligently, by sending me a precious gift, a copper medal. Is this for bravery in taking on the controversial task of "Bringing Together Diverse Pieces of the Ancient American Puzzle" (as the inscription on the disc says)? This copper medallion is the emblem of the AAPS, "Ancient Artifact Preservation Society" (Since 1999). Possession of this copper and green artefact (sic) would make me an honorary member of  this honorable society, I ween. (Don't waste good old words, I say.) The five Great Lakes of the USA and Canada are depicted on it; there are various letters of the Iron-Age Phoenician alphabet sprinkled around, but the letter M of the Bronze-Age West-Semitic protoalphabet, which represents waves of water, and has three or more of these peaks (rather than the two in the M of the Phoenician and Greco-Roman alphabets) appears many times, on or beside the lakes; the meaning of the other Phoenician inscriptions escapes me at present.  On the other side of the disc the main caption is: "Bringing Together Diverse Pieces of the Ancient American Puzzle"; a sail-ship is depicted, accompanied by the triumphant statement, "U.P. Copper Fueled the Bronze Age".
    The mysterious "U.P." is explained by Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper_mining_in_Michigan
" Within the state of Michigan, copper is found almost exclusively in the western portion of the Upper Peninsula, in an area known as the Copper Country. The Copper Country is highly unusual among copper-mining districts, because copper is predominantly found in the form of pure copper metal "
   The ship with a sail depicted on the AAPS disc is from a petroglyph discovered in the copper realm
(see Fig. 7 in: Jay Stuart Wakefield, Michigan Copper in the Mediterranean, 2011)
https://grahamhancock.com/wakefieldjs1/

The ancients came to America for the pure copper; the world's largest supply was located in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
did-copper-for-the-old-worlds-bronze-age-come-from-mines-in-the-new-world

https://eos.org/articles/miners-left-pollution-trail-great-lakes-6000-years-ago

https://www.eyeofthepsychic.com/copper/

https://grahamhancock.com/wakefieldjs1/

    We now have the two sides of the authenticating metal coin: archaeology and epigraphy (or palaiogrammatology, my new word for the study of ancient scripts, the term "scripts" meaning "writing systems" and also the "epigraphic texts" they have produced).

    The ancient Uluburun ship (at the bottom of the sea, south of Anatolia, modern Turkey) has a cargo of ingots of pure copper, which can be traced back to Michigan, the main source of unalloyed copper
(J. S. Wakefield, with extensive bibliography).

    Such a ship is depicted at the Kongsberg silver mine in Norway, which also has West Semitic inscriptions from the Bronze Age.

    Obviously, in antiquity Scandinavians and Mediterranians knew where the metals were available, all round the Atlantic region.

    Phoenicians left inscriptions and a walled town at a gold mine in Texas; and their presence in Jamaica and Puerto Rico is manifested by inscriptions on cultural objects.

https://cryptcracker.blogspot.com/2019/10/phoenicians-in-puerto-rico.html

    A gentle observation: George Mendenhall deciphered the West Semitic Proto-syllabary in Michigan, without realizing that there was another example of the script in Michigan.

   One topic that must not go unmentioned is the possibility that the West Semitic visitors to the mines in America may have established colonies, and their genes and their words may still be detectable in the people and cultures of this land.
  In October 2013, Robert Feather (a British metallurgist and writer of books) participated in the 9th AAPS conference on ancient America, and learned that Bronze-Age America was visited by voyagers from the Mediterranean world,  searching for precious minerals, and some of them settled there . He also heard Cherokee evidence of Hebraic presence, and an Amerindian named Duane Kinnart, of the Ojibway tribe, chanted to him a ceremonial song that contained the name Yahwe, (Where Moses Stood, London, 2014, Appendix 5, 294-297)

    Kevin Callaghan has asked an artificial intelligence for its opinion on  his prized artifact: in response it expresses a few sweet nothings about the relationship between the person's hand  (dressed in a scarlet cloth?!) and what it thinks (in its own cute way) to be his stone tool for carving or engraving; but it recognizes it as "a rock with writing on it", and also "other markings that appear to be symbols or shapes". Should we accept this insight of this quick-thinking machine, and look for some significant marks inside the square?