Comoro & Moroni

[RevTestament]

4 minutes ago, Rajah Manchou said:

Good point, and thanks for taking the time to look it over. Its good to have a second set of eyes looking at it and catching these things. There are a few things I have identified as weak points, and your comment has identified one of them.

However, having been to this area of Malaysia and Thailand I can say that 5 miles per day through the jungle is not easy and in some places you would be crawling, literally. There are accounts of the first Europeans in Siam taking a week or more to go 30-50 miles. One Chinese monk says that a very similar journey took him one month + 11 days and then another 30 to get to the top of the peninsula. (source)

I usually don't like to compare one model to another, but this map places the distance slightly farther than the Meso model and it is within the range recommended by John Clark and others.

Go right ahead and compare - I'm not a meso modelist.  But you do make a good point that your model is talking about an area with a dense tropical jungle which would definitely slow travel. But here is another problem. The Book of Mormon specifically brings up a new food crop: corn. How about barley and wheat? Anything like that in Malay? There was definitely no corn. Mesoamerica - no barley or wheat that I know of.

 

[Rajah Manchou]

1 hour ago, RevTestament said:

Go right ahead and compare - I'm not a meso modelist.  But you do make a good point that your model is talking about an area with a dense tropical jungle which would definitely slow travel. But here is another problem. The Book of Mormon specifically brings up a new food crop: corn. How about barley and wheat? Anything like that in Malay? There was definitely no corn. Mesoamerica - no barley or wheat that I know of.

Barley is the easiest of these three. In times past the island of Sumatra, right next to the Malay Peninsula, was called Java Div...the Island of Barley. Plenty of evidence of barley and millet. Here are some supporting sources.

Wheat couldn't have been easy to grow, but there are Arabic accounts from Kalah (Nephi in this model) in the 10th century claiming that the people live on wheat and dates, and that wheat was found in the markets. So they were getting it from somewhere. Wheat was grown north in Burma, Thailand and Yunnan during the Book of Mormon timeframe. (source)

Corn is of course the most difficult problem for the any old world model. Some have proposed (unconvincing) evidence that maize was cultivated in India and China. (source):

Quote

Uchibayashi (2005) reports an illustration of maize in a 1505 Chinese herbal entitled Bencao Pinhui Jingyao. He deems it unlikely that maize could have diffused all the way to China in just 13 years after 1492, and hence interprets this as "clear evidence" that maize must have been in China "at least a few decades before 1505."

Uchibayashi also reports the use of the word yumi (maize) in the poem Youwu zashu, written by Xie Yingfan circa 1368. Two additional references, to yumai-zi or corn-silk, appear in works dating to the 15th century, though it could not be ascertained that these were not later additions to the original works.

Uchibayashi (2005), which reports the new finds, is in English. Uchibayashi (2006a) is a Japanese extension of Uchibayashi (2005). Uchibayashi (2006b), also in Japanese, is a survey of earlier work on the pre-Columbian maize issue.

I don't think there's enough solid evidence for maize in India or Asia. It feels too much like the weak arguments for wheat in America. But since the Book of Mormon draws so much from the KJV, I think its safe to use the KJV definition of corn, and Webster's 1828 definition of corn (source):

1. A single seed of certain plants, as wheat, rye, barley and maiz; a grain. It is generally applied to edible seeds, which, when ripe, are hard.
2. The seeds of certain plants in general, in bulk or quantity. In this sense, the word comprehends all the kinds of grain which constitute the food of men and horses. In Great Britain, corn is generally applied to wheat, rye, oats and barley. In the United States, it has the same general sense, but by custom, it is appropriated to maiz.

Edited April 28, 2017 by Rajah Manchou