Rajah Manchou

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hg2nB5mrZb.E

Fascinating, you got any more of those?

I agree, but apparently he was working from an estimate of the extent of the Asian continent that was woefully off. He thought the distance across the Atlantic to the Indies was something like 3,700 miles, not the actual 7,700 miles. No ship of the 15th century could possibly have carried enough provisions to cross that wide an ocean without some resupply in the middle, so his voyage would have been utterly doomed -- but fortunately, as you point out, the Americas were in the way.

But if a 15th century ship could not have survived a 7,700 mile voyage then could the Lehites and Mulekites have survived voyages that were twice as long (14,000 miles against the current) across the Pacific 2000 years earlier?

Columbus is getting a bad rap from sources from American-haters Noam Chomsky and Howard Zimm.

All this nonsense about Columbus committing atrocities such as cutting up infants, etc are lies perpetuated by Chomsky and Zimm revising history to instigate their hatred of America and/or promoting the lies of Bobadilla.

The accounts of Columbus cutting up infants etc. comes through the first-hand accounts of Bartoleme de Las Casas who knew Columbus. His father and uncles were with Columbus on his second voyage and Las Casas also went to the New World in 1502 an reported on conditions:

“They attacked the towns and spared neither the children nor the aged nor pregnant women nor women in childbed, not only stabbing them and dismembering them but cutting them to pieces as if dealing with sheep in the slaughter house...They laid bets as to who, with one stroke of the sword, could split a man in two or could cut off his head or spill out his entrails with a single stroke of the pike. They took infants from their mothers’ breasts, snatching them by the legs and pitching them headfirst against the crags or snatched them by the arms and threw them into the rivers, roaring with laughter and saying as the babies fell into the water, ‘Boil there, you offspring of the devil!'”

Las Casas also makes it clear that the natives they encountered were not at all a threat to the Spanish, and often tried to help them:

"Of all the infinite universe of humanity, these people are the most guileless, the most devoid of wickedness and duplicity, the most obedient and faithful to their native masters and to the Spanish Christians whom they serve. They are by nature the most humble, patient, and peaceable, holding no grudges, free from embroilments, neither excitable nor quarrelsome. These people are the most devoid of rancors, hatreds, or desire for vengeance of any people in the world...They are also poor people, for they not only possess little but have no desire to possess worldly goods. For this reason they are not arrogant, embittered, or greedy...They are very clean in their persons, with alert, intelligent minds, docile and open to doctrine, very apt to receive our holy Catholic faith, to be endowed with virtuous customs, and to behave in a godly fashion. And once they begin to hear the tidings of the Faith, they are so insistent on knowing more and on taking the sacraments of the Church and on observing the divine cult that, truly, the missionaries who are here need to be endowed by God with great patience in order to cope with such eagerness. Some of the secular Spaniards who have been here for many years say that the goodness of the Indians is undeniable and that if this gifted people could be brought to know the one true God they would be the most fortunate people in the world."

"Yet into this sheepfold, into this land of meek outcasts there came some Spaniards who immediately behaved like ravening wild beasts, wolves, tigers, or lions that had been starved for many days. And Spaniards have behaved in no other way during the past forty years, down to the present time, for they are still acting like ravening beasts, killing, terrorizing, afflicting, torturing, and destroying the native peoples, doing all this with the strangest and most varied new methods of cruelty, never seen or heard of before, and to such a degree that this Island of Hispaniola once so populous (having a population that I estimated to be more than three million), has now a population of barely two hundred persons."

And Columbus is getting a bad rap?

I've said some of this stuff before and I'll say it again.

I fear we are victims of the direction of culture and our environment. That it, by and large, directs what we teach and talk about. Such direction isn't in itself bad, of course, at least I wouldn't say so. But it can influence us to focus on things we need not.

 

As a member of the Church outside America, I can't count the number of times a very simple discussion about faith or charity has been squelched by members from the States choosing to instead discuss American politics or gay marriage or gun control or socialism, or any number of issues that aren't at all relevant to our ward.

There is a reason non-American Mormons never appear on these discussion boards. We have no idea what you guys are talking about half the time. Its usually 90% American and 10% Mormon.

Facilitated rape?!

Started slavery in the new world!.

human sexual trafficing.

More attrocities.

The interpretation of 1 Nephi 13:12-13 has always felt off to me. I don't believe that God could have had any part in guiding a man to a New World to introduce such horrors. Verse 13 doesn't quite fit either:

"And it came to pass that I beheld the Spirit of God, that it wrought upon other Gentiles; and they went forth out of captivity, upon the many waters."

Captivity? Not really:

"It’s fair to say that the Pilgrims left England to find religious freedom, but that wasn’t the primary motive that propelled them to North America. Remember that the Pilgrims went first to Holland, settling eventually in the city of Leiden. There they encountered a religious tolerance almost unheard of in that day and age. Bradford and Edward Winslow both wrote glowingly of their experience. In Leiden, God had allowed them, in Bradford’s estimation, “to come as near the primitive pattern of the first churches as any other church of these later times.” God had blessed them with “much peace and liberty,” Winslow echoed.

If a longing for religious freedom had compelled them, they probably never would have left. But while they cherished the freedom of conscience they enjoyed in Leiden, the Pilgrims had two major complaints: They found it a hard place to maintain their English identity and an even harder place to make a living. In America, they hoped to live by themselves, enjoy the same degree of religious liberty and earn a “better and easier” living." link

Who went to America to escape captivity? If anything, almost every nation in the New World was built by millions of native American and African slaves in captivity. 

America's True History of Religious Tolerance

The main thing I get out of that passage in the Book of Mormon was that God wanted the Old and New Worlds to come into permanent contact with each other. Columbus for some reason happened to be the person who initiated permanent interaction between continents. The Columbian exchange definitely wreaked havoc on the Indians, but I think it was probably one of the main things that led to the huge advancements humanity made during the following centuries, and made us into the globalized society that we are today.

 

ETA: I've heard people argue that the Book of Mormon is talking about someone else like Cabeza de Vaca or de Las Casas, but it seems pretty clear to me that it's supposed to be Columbus.

I like this idea, but Magellan was the first to demonstrate that the oceans were connected and that a complete round of the earth could be made, effectively linking the Old World to the New World. He also claimed to be driven/led by a divine purpose or power and was many times more humane than your typical conquistador. Magellan also discovered many of the islands in the Pacific including Guam and the Philippines, where he was killed before he could complete his circuit.

If we're looking for the first person to sail all the way around, that honor probably goes to Enrique of Malacca, Magellan's Malay slave, the first to leave from his homeland and return.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enrique_of_Malacca

I couldn't wrap my head around most of it, but I also enjoyed reading it. Thanks for sharing Piccione.

Not sure what constitutes evidence but the Malay model meets every requirement I've been able to identify, including plenty of real live elephants and 100+ other items including iron, silk, swords etc. 

https://www.evernote.com/l/AAipPZOLrFJHhLexHnH_T7xTsf0tGjEn2bQ

Recent DNA testing of tribes originating in the Malay archipelago has demonstrated high presence of T1 and J1 haplogroups, the markers most frequently associated with Assyrian and Babylonian exiles. The historical record and map also match up nicely. If we consider the possibility of a Book of Mormon based in the islands of the sea, almost all anachronisms are resolved, and the Book of Mormon begins to resemble an accurate historical text of the people that migrated east across the Pacific to settle the New World.

The pillar, as Coe points out, is probably the notorious lingam.  Prof. Richard Cowen of UC Davis wrote this in 1999 about Indian iron technology for his Geology 115 course, http://mygeologypage.ucdavis.edu/cowen/~GEL115/115CH5.html :

 

In the 4th century AD, the Gupta king Chandra II erected a gigantic iron pillar to honor Garuda, Vishnu's representative. The pillar still stands in a courtyard outside Delhi. It is 7 m (22 feet) tall, weighs six tons, and is made of iron so pure (99.72%) that it has not rusted in the 1600 years it has been exposed to the weather. This is the largest piece of forged iron that has survived from ancient times, and must have been made by heating and hammering together hundreds of iron ingots.

 

Of course the technology had been available already for centuries in China, where blast furnaces were being used at least from about 1 AD.   Steelmaking was already being done in China by 1000 BC.

Was reading up on iron production in China and thought this was interesting. Way back before much was known about the Far East, China was known as Serica, or the "land where silk comes from". Pliny reports that it was inhabited by a people called the Seres that lived to the age of 130, "exceeded the ordinary human height, had flaxen hair, and blue eyes" and were the first to produce silk from the silkworm. Pliny also mentions that they produced the finest iron.

Given the early accounts, some have suggested that the Seres might be related to the Tocharians, Indo-Europeans that crossed the Takla Makan Desert around the same time that the Jaredites went east. Could "Seres" be related to Deseret? Some dialects from southern China pronounce a final s as a t. For example, Thais will say Joseph Smit, and Jesus Chrite because they can't pronounce an s at the end of a word. So seres would become seret. Not far from Deseret, a people known in the Book of Mormon for their industry in apiculture, so maybe they also perfected sericulture.

Wild speculation again, but thought it was interesting given the conversation about iron in China.

The pillar, as Coe points out, is probably the notorious lingam.  Prof. Richard Cowen of UC Davis wrote this in 1999 about Indian iron technology for his Geology 115 course, http://mygeologypage.ucdavis.edu/cowen/~GEL115/115CH5.html :

A lingam or a stupa are possibilities, but this monument doesn't match anything from the Gupta, Pallava or Chola empires and there's no evidence of an Indian or Chinese presence on the Malay Peninsula until the mid 3rd Century AD. 

"This is one of a kind. You can’t find this anywhere in the world, only right here in Sungai Batu,” says Mokhtar, pointing to a structure that looks like a stupa. Except that it is not. Traditional stupas found around the world, especially in India and Nepal, sit upon a square base. There is then a rounded structure built on top of the stupa. The Sungai Batu stupa is a reverse structure with a square structure on a round base. All stupas in the world have their entrances located in the east. The Sungai Batu monument as the structure is now called, has an entrance built on the south side. Interestingly, it looks in the direction of Gunung Jerai. Stupa experts from around the world were invited to study the Sungai Batu monument. Interestingly, all agreed that it neither represented Buddhism nor Hinduism. Instead, it strongly pointed towards animism." (source)

I realize its a stretch to say this could be Arabic, Canaanite or Yahweh, but I'm taking that leap because the legends of the founding of Bujang Valley can be boiled down to the following elements, a warrior/foreigner from Arabia/Persia is led by God (or a personal genie) across the waters. In the Funan and Zhenla versions, the foreigner had a dream that he should board a ship, when he woke up the next morning he discovered a divine bow and God led him across the waters. Compare this to the account of Lehi having a dream he should enter the wilderness, and then upon waking he finds a divine ball which some LDS scholars (Nibley) have compared to Arabic belomancy and divination arrows. 

In the Malay epics the foreign ruler is a warrior named Merong/Maran/Maroni with a connection to King Solomon and a place that sounds like Gumran or Qumran. These founding legends don't rule out a Brahman priest from India, but Brahman priests weren't likely to venture beyond Mother India in those days and the archaeology doesn't support the influence of Brahmins or Buddhists until the 4th or 5th century AD. This site appears 1000 years earlier, in 600 BC, around the time there was a wave of migrants pouring into the Arabian Desert, like Lehi. Some of those sailed as far as Cochin in India, with some possibly going overland to Kaifeng in China via Burma. Many of the hill tribes in this region worship a deity called Ywa and tell of a younger white brother who took their golden book west.

The Malay epics hint at a link between the Arabian Peninsula and the Malay Peninsula at some point after 600 BC, so I'm wondering if Arab/Hebrew migrants also arrived at Pulau Serai near Lembah Bujang. In any case, the possibility is interesting as the Book of Mormon seems to describe everything up to this point accurately.

Thank you for that.

 

One expert on Mexican art (under whom I studied) covered all of the close relationships and analogies of Mexico and Mesoamerica with Asia and Southeast Asia.  What Coe is saying is small scale and merely a portion of the overall, well-accepted comparisons.  Coe explains how his interest came to be, and it is understandable that he has become a diffusionist on this scale.  He still travels to the Far East to see such sites.

There is an interesting case unfolding in Southeast Asia right now. About 5 years ago a religious monument was unearthed in a place called Lembah Bujang. The bricks at the base of the monument have been OSL dated to 110 AD, but charcoal from iron furnaces in the site have been dated to 600-500 BC. This was a totally unexpected find, as it shows a highly advanced iron-age civilization practicing a religion that predates the presence of Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam. Its a large square built on a circular foundation, with a hole in the middle which probably held a large wooden pole (image). The monument faces Mount Serai/Sarai to the north where a fire altar has been found.

I've no evidence of this, but fire altars in high places above a wooden pole on a circle/square earth monument sounds like Yahweh/Asherah cult to me. At the very least, the presence of a massive iron smelting industry does not suggest aboriginal animism. Even the Malay archaeologists are starting to suggest some sort of Abrahamic or Hanif influence. That's probably just wishful thinking on their part (being conservative Muslims) but it does provide some evidence that groups like the Lehites might be historical, and passed this way in 600 BC. I'm not a scholar so would appreciate any kind of professional academic feedback.

One interesting footnote, this civilization in Lembah Bujang was the precursor to the kingdoms of Funan and Zhenla that eventually became the Khmer civilization in Angkor Wat.

The thing is that there is abundant evidence of contact between Polynesians and various tribes of North and South America, including the Maori (and/or Tahitians) contacting the Chumash and Gabrielinos of California, and the close cultural comparisons of the Maori with the Kwakiutl of British Columbia.  Cf. http://etc.ancient.eu/2013/03/26/polynesians-in-california-evidence-for-an-ancient-exchange/ , and http://users.on.net/~mkfenn/page3.htm .

 

Then there is Thor Heyerdahl's massive American Indians in the Pacific (London: Allen & Unwin, 1952).

All of the existing evidence points to migrations from Asia and Australasia into the New World. Not everything is known of course, but I wouldn't rule out that 25,000 years ago Asians/Australasians reached the New World and then turned back around and headed back towards Asia. Unlikely, but there is always that possibility. Michael Coe suggests that the Mayans and the Cambodian kingdom of Angkor Wat were  "parallel civilizations" and hints the Maya might have gone east by boat.

Any way you look at it, Jacob says that the isles of the sea were already inhabited by Israelites in 600 BC. We just don't know how they got there. Jaredite migrations from east Asia? Earlier eastward migrations of Joktan? Jewish refugees/traders fleeing persecution in 700 BC? I've no idea.

One would have to found out when the Polynesian islands were populated, that I do not know.

Polynesians are of Malay and Austronesian descent. The Malay are a scattered race that extends from east Africa and across the isles of the sea to the jungles of Brazil (source). The prevailing theory is that they originated on the east coast of Asia, in Formosa (Taiwan) and started their expansion through the isles of the sea around the time of the Jaredites (3000 BC). But recent genetic testing shows highest concentrations of shared DNA between some aboriginal tribes in Brazil and aboriginal tribes found on the Malay Peninsula and the nearby Andaman Islands.

Where on the official site does it use the name of Zoram?

At the very bottom of the page:

As noted in the previous post and linked article, Zoram is an unrecognized state straddling India and Myanmar. Its divided up into East Zoram and West Zoram. Their leader is named Zoramthanga, so it is also a personal name. The name is also present in the name of the Indian state where the Bnei Manashe live, Mizoram.

The Bnei Manashe do not know their exact origins, they've lost their records which were believed to be kept on leather scrolls instead of metal plates like neighboring tribes. There are a few different versions. One being that they fled slavery in Assyria by going down the Arabian Peninsula and crossing the Indian Ocean. This seems to have been a common route as there are also Jews in Cochin India that claim to have come that direction around 600 BC.

"The first material traces of Jewish settlements in India are dated back by the end of the first millennium A.D. They include the above mentioned copper plates from Cochin. But there are a lot of testimonies showing that in reality, Jews could come to Southern Asia much earlier. The very fact that the Jewish groups we know about preferred to settle along the Malabar Coast speaks of their involvement in the international trading system. It is clear that numerous ethno-genetic legends spread around different groups of Indian Jews get concentrated on other events or causes. The meaning of an ethno-genetic legend, Jewish in particular, boils down to tying them to the general pattern of Jewish and world history. This is essentially the task of all etiologic and exegetic narratives, both written and folklore, up to the new times and the development of critical historical thinking. No wonder both the Kochi and the Bene Israel Jews tell different variations of how their coming to India is tied to significant events in the biblical history: exile of ten tribes to Assyria, exile to Babylon, destruction of the First and Second Temples, etc. The allusion to the voyage of King Solomon’s messengers to Ophir breaks somewhat out of the beaten track but it still brings the history of the group in line with the common Jewish history." (source)

In short, nobody knows their origins, but there they are, Zoramites from the Tribe of Manasseh. There are also the Lemba Jews in Zimbabwe that have a similar story. They claim their ancestors left around 700-600 BC by sea, but they had a layover in a place called Sena and then sailed off again. After reading a bit about them, I suspect they sailed along the trading routes to Ophir (present day India or Malaysia). Then after a few hundred years, like Hagoth, they sailed west along the trading routes to the area around Madagascar, which could explain the names of Moroni in the Comoros Islands. Their oral legends say their ship was destroyed and they ended up in Zimbabwe. DNA tests on the Lemba show higher rates of the Cohen Haplotype than some Jewish communities in Israel. (source) This is one of the main reasons I identify the Malay Peninsula as a point of interest for the Book of Mormon account. I suspect the Lehites landed at Lembah Bujang and set up the iron forging industry that is just now being discovered. (source) The iron swords forged in this region were said to be of the highest quality, even Muhammad had a sword made here.

Pretty interesting that there is historical and genetic evidence that Jewish refugees/merchants were sailing east from the Arabian Peninsula in 600 BC. +1 for the Book of Mormon as a historical record. And a civilization with iron forging appearing around 600 BC. +1. And a founding legend of man named Maroni. +1. And an unidentified religion that looks a bit like it could be straight out of the Arabian Desert. +1. Elephants, silk, chariots, horses etc. Joseph couldn't have made it up.

Please demonstrate why a nonLDS scholar of ancient texts would read the text literally. Would a nonLDS scholar read the Bible literally?

When I say literally, I mean that when the text mentions something like an iron sword, that means (literally) an iron sword, not a wooden sword or an obsidian machuital. An isle in the sea is an island, an elephant is an elephant, silk is silk, etc.

The links are working for me but I can embed them here again if it doesn't get too annoying. The image below is from the newsletter of the Shavei Israel community which is dedicated to restoring the lost tribes to Israel. Their website is here. There is plenty written about the Bnei Manashe of Zoram (an unrecognized state straddling India and Myanmar) that can be Googled but this is their official website. 

-

If we were to watch a movie about a group of people that sail to an island with elephants, silk, chariots, horses, writing, walled cities with wooden towers, iron, swords, etc. would anyone assume that the movie was set in Michigan, or Guatemala?

If we read the text literally, as a non-LDS scholar would, we wouldn't be satisfied with either location. But there is a location that meets all the requirements. That location was even called Sion in older texts. There is an iron-age civilization that practiced a unique and unidentified religion dating back to exactly 600 BC where the Lehites might have landed. Iron, elephants, silk, swords, golden plates, horses, barley, writing, chariots, walled cities. Its all there. One founding legends talk of a man that was led across the waters by God. Another legend tells of a warrior named Maran or Maroni who sailed from the Arabian peninsula. 

But most importantly, there is a tribe there called "Zoram People of Manasseh" that claim to be descendants of Manasseh, and have been officially recognized as Jews and are returning to Israel. This tribe has oral legends of a darkness that fell across their land around 30 AD that was so heavy that fires could not be lit and people would die if they fell asleep. Neighboring tribes have a legend of a lost golden book with their spiritual history that was taken west by their younger white brother. 

Is it possible that a tribe called Zoram officially recognized as descendants of Manasseh with legends of a lost golden book that will be returned to them by their white brothers from the west is just a coincidence? I recognize the dangers of parrallelomania, but when we discover a lost tribe of Zoramites who have been officially recognized as the Tribe of Manasseh, is it a stretch to assume they might be connected to the Book of Mormon in some way?
 

Where do you get the implication of "surrounded"?

If we look at the world from the perspective of the Lehites in 600 BC, everything beyond the Arabian Peninsula would have been contained in a sealed-off sea full of islands. There was no known Pacific Ocean or North/South American continent until the early 16th century, just before Magellan circumnavigated the globe.

All that the Mulekites and Lehites would have known in 600 BC was that there was a land of gold (Ophir) somewhere in a sea of "islands" to the east, and that those islands were possibly inhabited by traders that had been sent by Solomon. The historical record does offer some evidence of this. There is a group of Jews in India with some memory of leaving the Arabian Peninsula on merchant vessels. The Lemba tribe in Zimbabwe claims to have come across the sea after escaping captivity in Babylon and DNA testing shows they have Cohen ancestry. So there is some hint of evidence to back up Jacob's claim in 2 Nephi that the "islands of the sea" were inhabited by Israelite migrants before 600 BC. 

My thinking is that the Mulekites and Lehites (or anyone before 100 AD) would not have known there was anything beyond the Indian Ocean. The Malay Peninsula forms a gigantic wall that was nearly impassable, a formidable enough barrier that it wasn't conquered by Europeans until the 15th century. From Lehi's perspective, this would have looked like the end of the road, a "narrow neck of land" in a closed off sea surrounded by other islands. The most knowledgable geographers and cartographers from 100 AD to 1492 AD believed the Indian Ocean was the end of the world and that it was a sea of islands, possibly inhabited by Hebrew/Phoenician/Sabean traders. I assume Jacob and Nephi would have had the same perspective and that seems to come through in the text:

This isn't to say that the remnant of the Lehites didn't eventually reach the New World, they just took the "slow boat". But even if Lehi did manage the feat of passing through the dangerous Straits of Malacca, past hundreds of islands to eventually cross the Pacific Ocean to reach South America, it seems they still believed they were on an island surrounded by a number of other inhabited islands, or so it seemed from their perspective. Remember the Book of Mormon is a record of the people of the American continent and the "source from whence they sprang". If we include the islands of the sea as a source, then it isn't too difficult to get in step with history and the archaeological record.

 

The main attraction for the "heartland model" seems to be emotional rather than textual. Ultra-nationalistic, almost jingoistic American amour propre appears to be the driving mainspring.

Lou Midgley once pointed out that the North Island of New Zealand fits geographically far better than any US American model. The Waikato river flows northward, there are active volcanoes, and the land north of the Isthmus of Auckland is even called Northland!

Finding the actual setting requires more than wishful thinking. Sorry.

The very first geographical reference in the Book of Mormon is that they were on an island in the sea, surrounded by other islands that were already inhabited by other Hebrews. That's clearly not Mesoamerica, or the Heartland. I think we should start considering models in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. 

Once you start looking in a location that actually has elephants, silk, chariots, iron, swords, writing, shipbuilding, etc. then things start to fall into place, and the Book of Mormon really does become a historical document tracing the path of groups from the Middle East across the isles of the sea to the New World. 

Perhaps it might be disingenuous if I had not clearly stated that there was a difference in time--and offered as the explanation the presentism of the writer. Surely you are aware of the issue in historical texts that were written long after the fact. So, you might suggest that it is wrong, but certainly not disingenuous when it was explicit in the original argument.

 

As for why it might be a case of presentism, again the argument explained in the paper. Mormon is interested in that location because of current events and is trying to make the connections clear. He has a textual interest in making the connection that is greater than making a historical point that he might never have known--since he never records that any who went there came back to describe it. The explanation is textually and historically consistent, and consistent with know aspects of ancient texts.

Mormon mentions that "there are many records kept of the proceedings of this people, by many of this people, which are particular and very large, concerning them." It seems there were plenty of historical records available so there wouldn't have been much need for Mormon to present the history. He probably just read and summarized. There wouldn't be a need for guesswork.

Also, there was a shipping industry built up to supply timber to the people in the north so it would have been common knowledge that there wasn't much wood from 50 BC.

Do you think that the deforestation had taken place due to the burning of so much timber with limestone, so as to make lime plaster?

According to archaeologists/geologists the dry zone in Burma was once a heavily forested region. The cutting of forests to fire brick kilns for construction of cities are said to be the primary cause of forest destruction. Other main causes of deforestation in the Dry zone were: (1) population growth, (2) agricultural encroachment, (3) increasing livestock population, (4) increasing demand for fuel wood. (Source)

The main point is that Teotihuacan suits the narrative and the perpective of Mormon as narrator. And there are multiple interrelated convergences.

 

Helaman 3 mentions that the deforestation had already taken place, and the trade in timber to meet their needs was well underway by 50 BC. 

"5. Yea, and even they did spread forth into all parts of the land, into whatever parts it had not been rendered desolate and without timber, because of the many inhabitants who had before inherited the land.  6. And now no part of the land was desolate, save it were for timber; but because of the greatness of the destruction of the people who had before inhabited the land it was called desolate. 7. And there being but little timber upon the face of the land, nevertheless the people who went forth became exceedingly expert in the working of cement; therefore they did build houses of cement, in the which they did dwell."

The land had already been deforested by the time they migrated north, well before Mormon narrated the events. 

I think I know your brother Fu.

Fu Manchou of Vorito? He's a cousin, but it is a small world on Beaver Island

Correct me if I'm wrong (I'm sure you will), but am I right in thinking that the Teotihuican convergence is only such if one assumes that Mormon was not describing conditions circa 50 BC, a time during which there is no evidence of cement use in Teotihuican or massive deforestation, but the geographical conditions of his own day (c.400AD)? If this is correct, is there any additional evidence/reason to warrant the assumption that Mormon made an editorial error because it seems like a point which rather undermines the claim? 

 

One thing in the Book of Mormon that doesn't seem to make sense is why Nephites would try to escape from the Lamanites by fleeing southward from Cumorah:

 

"all my people, save it were those twenty and four who were with me, and also a few who had escaped into the south countries, and a few who had deserted over unto the Lamanites, had fallen" (Mormon 6:15)

 

Baja offers an explanation for this that makes sense.  Nephites could flee south to flee AWAY from their enemies:

That's interesting. Any thoughts on why the Nephites wouldn't have just continued north?

Only thing I can think of is that the land north was occupied by unfriendlies, or that they really were on an island.

The only BOM theory I've heard of that offers a historical account of destruction and darkness around that time period is the Malay theory. The hill tribes in Burma have an oral legend that says there was a period of intense darkness called Thimzing.

"The period of ‘Thimzing’ is believed to be between A.D. 25-40. This unusual total darkness befell humanity for consecutive 7 days and 7 nights. There was shortage of dry firewood and other daily essential items. The interesting thing said about the unusual event was that the ghosts (spirits) of the dead visit human beings. It was also said that whoever doze were dying. In order to keep their eyes widely opened (not doze), they used to insert a bamboo-chip between the eyes to keep the eyes widely opened. The clansmen gathered together at the house of the chieftain and sang together."