Map A shows the location of Mesopotamia and both the area of Babel where the Jaredites lived, and the Valley of Nimrod where the Lord directed them to go upon leaving Babel, in relation to the Persian Gulf, and the Arabian Peninsula.
Map B shows the first portion of the journey, where they (1) traveled from Babel to the area north and into (2) the Valley of Nimrod. Today, this valley is filled as a man-made lake called Lake Tharthar, the only depression northward from Babel that could be considered a valley in times past. From (2) the Valley of Nimrod they traveled along the north side of the river down (3) toward the Euphrates and Tigris delta, a swampy marshland filled in times past with lakes, rivers, waterways and marshes, requiring boats (barges) in order to cross to the south. Today, this land is occupied by the Marsh Arabs who still use these flat-bottomed barges in order to navigate across the two-hunred mile wide delta. Once at this delta (3), they built the barges indicated in Ether and moved through the marshland to the south and to (4) the “Sea in the Wilderness,” the head of the Persian Gulf.
Map C shows the journey to the (8) “Sea that divideth the land,” the Arabian Sea, the same sea Lehi called Irreantum. They traveled from (5,6,7) water hole to water hole along a known trail that later became the northbound trail up the Arabian Peninsula for hundreds of Camel Caravans. They arrived in the area (8) of Khor Rori along the coast of Oman from which they built more barges, this time like submarines, so they could cross the “sea that divideth the land” to the Land of Promise. The inlet of Khor Rori is in the area of Salalah, and there are numerous evidences that the Jaredites settled there for four years, leaving it a veritable “Bountiful” where the Lehi Colony later thrived for up to two years while building the ship that would take them to the Land of Promise.
Where are you getting your information? You have provided no citations of anything either in the scriptures or in scientific publications as justification for this route, and that worries me greatly, especially considering the numerous gaping holes in it.
ReplyDeleteThere is no evidence in the Book of Ether of travelling in any particular direction arriving in the valley of Nimrod. In fact, I would say that the phrase "Where never there had been man" in Ether 2:5 negates any notion that they followed the Tigris river downstream, as that area was populated. It seems that you're making a lot of blind conjectures here and shouldn't be publishing it as fact, especially since you make it fit so nicely with Lehi's journey, a correlation for which there is no Book of Mormon evidence. More likely they continued in another direction entirely before arriving at an ocean.
It's especially insulting when you consider that unlike Nephi's sailing ship, the Jaredites' barges relied on wind and ocean currents to propel them to the Promised land, and the currents from your supposed point of entry into the ocean would have led them to the tip of India, then along the equator to east Africa, then north back to where they started. With no way to navigate, such as Nephi had in the form of the Liahona, the Jaredite barges would never have made it out of the Indian Ocean this way.
One more inaccuracy is that your proposed route avoids mountainous areas, though clearly the Jaredites traveled through mountainous areas because we are told in Ether 12:30 that the brother of Jared commanded a mountain to be removed. So it is far more likely that the Jaredites continued northward from the valley of Nimrod through the Caucasus mountains, or through any of the other mountainous regions nearby, than that they stayed in the Tigris valley.
Just to be clear, I'm not doubting the scriptural record. I'm questioning your methods of 'conveniently' filling in the holes in the story with things for which there is no scriptural or scientific evidence. There is simply not enough evidence to publish a definitive route, and the one you are proposing is unsound. Despite the evidences of human population in the area of Bountiful, there is no indication that this population and the Jaredite civilization were the same, and to claim so is speculation bordering on fabrication.
Wait a minute! He is showing the empty quarter (where no man had ever been before) as being somewhere out in the middle of Arabia, not down at Bountiful. Ether states that the Lord led them out into the wilderness where no man had ever been. "Wilderness". Nephi's Bountiful is not really considered a wilderness in the sense that Ether was talking about. The barges they first used to traverse waters before reaching the point where they would build the barges "tight as a dish" were used to earlier. They would have avoided the other peoples as much as possible, which they could have done over the huge delta north of the Persian Gulf and on up to the valley of Nimrod.
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