Netto first accepted the inscription as genuine, but by 1873, philologist Ernest Renan convinced him that it was a forgery.[8] Its letter forms vary from those that occurred and disappeared over a span of 800 years; such confluence in a single piece of writing implies that it was a forgery.[8][9] No scholar ever saw the stone or located its source, and during 1873–74 Netto tried and failed to find the individual who had supplied the copy of the inscription.[8] In the 1960s, Cyrus H. Gordon provided a new translation, and stated his conclusion that it was genuine, since it didn't copy any Semitic writing that would have been widely accessible at the time.[10] Frank Moore Cross disagreed, saying that "Everything in the inscription was available to the forger in nineteenth century handbooks or from uninspired guesses based on these easily available sources," and clarified that the letter forms cover a range of ten centuries.[8]