Nibley’s Asian Steppes and the Jaredites – Part IV

One of the important considerations of the Jaredites moving across the Steppes is how thehy got to the Steppes from Mesopotamia in the first place. This first leg of Nibley’s proposed journey for them would be just as difficult as the eastern end of such a journey. To move from the area of Babel in Mesopotamia, the Jaredites would have had to pass over the Caucasus Mountains—a significant barrier for any people of antiquity.

Between Mesopotamia and the Steppes area is the Caucasus Mountain range, a geopolitical region called the Caucasus that lies between Europe, Asia and the Middle East. The word Caucasus derives from Caucas, the ancestor of the North Caucasians. He was a son of Togarmah, grandson of Noah's third son Japheth. According to Leonti Mroveli after the fall of the Tower of Babel and the division of humanity into different languages, Togarmah settled with his sons: Kartlos, Haik, Movakos, Lekos, Heros, Kavkas, and Egros between two inaccessible mountains, presumably Mount Ararat and Mount Elbrus. The Caucasus Mountains are generally perceived to be a dividing line between Asia and Europe, and territories in Caucasia are alternately considered to be in one or both continents. The highest peak in the Caucasus is Mount Elbrus at 18,510 feet which, in the western Ciscaucasus in Russia, is generally considered the highest point in Europe.

From the banks of the Don, and far and wide along the course of the Manytch and Kouma, stretches a weary waste of barren steppe country, which gradually loses itself in the inhospitable slopes that bind the Caspian Sea. Abruptly and unexpectedly however, from this dreary and monotonous plain, there arise first a chain of hills, and then a mighty range of mountains, towering ever higher and higher, and throwing out spurs that slope to embosom broad, sunny, smiling valleys, while, at the same time the loftiest peaks rise to the height of everlasting snow; where the glaciers only melt sufficiently to feed the torrents, which leap roaring and foaming from cliff and cavern. This varied and rugged range of mountains is covered in many parts with the forests of the most luxuriant vegetation, though its wild, sharp peaks pierce beyond the line of perpetual snow—it extends from the Black Sea to the Caspian, and forms nature’s boundary between the two continents of Europe and Asia.

The range of the Caucasus, with its thousand bare and fantastically shaped summits, extends for a length of one hundred and fifty miles, from Anapa, on the Black Sea, to Cape Abcharan, on the Caspian. Among the loftiest points in the principle range, proceeding from west to east, rise most conspicuously the Oschten, Nisiri, Maruch, Dschumantan, Tuturguh, and Elbruz, and about the middle of the range stands out pre-eminently the Kasbeck, and to the east and south-east, the Kadori, the Sakoris-twer, and the Kah-dagh. In the neighborhood of the pass of Dariel. The Elbruz, the loftiest peak of the Caucasus range, is about 16,000 feet, the Kasbek 14,400 feet, and it is constantly covered from summit to base with ice and snow..

Throughout history, there has never been a connection between Mesopotamia and the Caucasus region, nor the Steppes beyond. The peoples of the Caucasus have always been an isolated people, fiercely independent, with a high chivalrous code that aggressively forbade any interaction with even other Caucasus tribes.

Even recently, a road to handle the long-distance trade across the Eurasian land mass sometimes called the “silk road,” is a way of caravanning around the Black Sea to avoid any movement through the Caucasus region though it would be by far the shortest distance between western points. Even with modern technology, an extremely circuitous route was found to be more profitable that such a route through the difficult areas indicated, saving some 229 million Euros for various difficulties in road transportation—the area Hugh Nibley would have the Jaredites travel through to reach the Steppes area.

This is hardly a pathway a group of men, women, children, and flocks of animals, would have taken—or could have taken—from Mesopotamia into the Asian Steppes. Once again, it is one thing to look at a map and say this is where they went—but quite another to actually move across such inhospitable terrain not even modern man is willing to traverse. But this is what Mesoamerican Theorists do and most people, unless they are world travelers and explorers, are not aware of the duplicity.

(Next: See the 5th Post in this series “How the Jaredites Got to the Sea”)