MORE ON THE LOS LUNAS INSCRIPTION: A reader informs me that this stone has been the subject of controversy for a while. You can read a page from the New Mexico State Land Office here which notes some entertainingly daft speculation. But it seems that Cyrus Gordon accepted this inscription as ancient, but he thought it was Samaritan and from the Byzantine era. (More on the inscription here.) (You may recall that Gordon also accepted a supposedly Phoenician inscription from Brazil as genuine, although it was rejected as a forgery by Phoenician specialist J. Friedrich and renowned epigrapher Frank Moore Cross Jr.)

Also, Professor James Tabor of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte has written that he is "tentatively convinced" that the Los Lunas inscription is ancient as well. I don't know of any Northwest Semitic epigraphers who agree, or of any peer-review publications supporting its genuineness. Count me as extremely skeptical, but it's not something I've put any time into, nor do I intend to.

If you're interested, here is the reference to Gordon's article. Our library doesn't carry this journal and I am not inclined to burn an interlibrary loan point for the piece.

Cyrus H. Gordon, "Diffusion of Near East Culture in Antiquity and in Byzantine Times," Orient 30-31 (1995): 69-81

Here is the bibliography on the Parahyba inscription from Brazil (all of it that I'm aware of, anyway). All but the last reference are from the journal Orientalia, vol. 37 (1968).

• Cyrus H. Gordon, "The Authenticity of the Phoenician Text from Parahyba," pp 75-80
  
• Gordon, "The Canaanite Text from Brazil," pp. 425-36
  
• Gordon, "Reply to Professor Cross," pp. 461-63
  
• J. Freidrich, "Die Unechtheit de phönizischen Inscrift aus Parhyba," pp. 421-24
  
• Frank Moore Cross Jr., "The Phoenician Inscription from Brazil. A Nineteenth-Century Forgery," pp. 437-60
  
• Cross, "Phoenicians in Brazil?" Biblical Archaeology Review, Jan/Feb 1979, pp. 36-43

UPDATE: Reader Duane Smith e-mails that Gordon also has a more popular treatment of the Parahyba inscription in Before Columbus, Links Between the Old World and Ancient America, 1971, pp. 120-126, which I have not seen.