The Karioitahi Artefact

This is a real doozy of a find. This artifact was discovered by a Mr Archibald T Bennett on 3rd June 1907 in the sand at the bottom of a cliff face on the southern reaches of Karioitahi Beach a few days after a winter storm. He had discovered a number of artifacts during his weekend walks in previous years. But what makes this find more remarkable still, is that there are few ancient occupation sites on the clifftops of this stretch of beach.

1908 archive photo

Was the item a relic of a shipwreck, or kept by local natives as a sacred item handed down over millenia? We will never know for sure as this item has never been officially recorded as discovered in New Zealand. It is not in any museum that we know of and we only stumbled on the picture by accident. The design resembles Egyptian styles, but it is most unlikely that they ever ventured this far down into the Indian Ocean or Pacific. The photo shows it to be in remarkable condition and the obscure report says it appears to be made of lapis lazuli, a blue stone not found in NZ. That alone makes it a genuine foreign object, possibly arriving in NZ long before Europeans arrived.

There are reported to be hieroglyphs near Gosford in Australia, but they have long been proven fake as while the carved forms are similar, the style and placement make no sense and the carving too perfect to have been carved so long ago. First of all, the way they're cut is not the way ancient Egyptian rock inscriptions are produced, and they are very disorganized. There is also a problem with the actual shapes of the signs that are used - there's no way people would have been inscribing texts from the time of Cheops from the signs that weren't invented until 2500 years later. That is a chronological discrepancy the believers choose to ignore. In other words symbols from Egyptian eras thousands of years apart have been grouped together. So the Gosford glyphs are obvious fakes for any thinking person. Still, some believe things to be something because they 'want' to believe it. But we have above, a picture of an artifact that is not so easily confirmed or discredited.

We once showed you the Chinese figurine found at Mauku which the Auckland Museum had without knowing where it was found. We produced an article on that unusual item here - https://tangatawhenua16.wixsite.com/the-first-ones-blog/single-post/2016/03/21/Sidestep-Unusual-Auckland-artifact

We are aware that it has long been suggested that Egyptians and Phoenicians reached these distant shores, but the likelihood of this occurring is so remote, or a complete fabrication...one would think. But is this item final proof that even changes the skeptical minds of us here at tangatawhenua16?

Did it just simply come here with some early European settlers who lost it on the beach...I mean the early pioneers always took their curios and heirlooms to the beach with them didn't they? (sarcasm fully intended).

However, this unusual relic shown above seems to be visible proof, at least, of the ability for an item to travel great distances whether by purpose on a ship or by transfer from people to people over a long period of time as a religious relic. Some say it is locked up in the depths of Te Papa or the Auckland Museum, and some even say it its simply a silly prank or April fools joke. The latter may indeed seem to be the case based on this recently discovered article http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-11728564 - and the fact of today's date being what it is.