The Nephites, the Lamanites and the Inca – Part III

The Inca themselves, and the many other groups that archaeologists have so flippantly given modern names, were the remnant of the house of Israel that entered this land around 600 B.C. and flourished there for a thousand years before degenerating into two distinct groups and the savagery that left only one group upon the land.

These were called Lamanites after their founder, Laman, who fought one another in smaller, independent tribes, for decades after the fall of the other group called Nephites, named after their founder, Nephi, in a battle that annihilated the remainder of the Nephite army of some 230,000 men (Mormon 6:11-13), and probably half a million or more women and children. Moroni, the last surviving General of the Nephite armies, describes the Lamanite savagery in the wars that followed among themselves “as one continual round of murder and bloodshed upon all the face of the land” (Mormon 8:8) and later that these wars were fierce between them (Moroni 1:2), and with no end in sight (Mormon 8:8).

An event about a thousand years later, as recorded in the epic poem “Inca Rocca,” written by Chauncey Thomas, who had the records of Montesinos and others to draw upon, describes the great, depressive lamentation of the continual wars between the Peruvians (Lamanites) in these words:

Since the time of the old empire’s fall,
A thousand years had passed.
Insatiate war, that heeds not right nor life, nor love,
Had gorged upon the people’s sustenance,
With famine, dread pestilence,
And still the strife went on,
No lasting peace, but ever and anon,
And now the angry notes of war were heard again,
And then the growing corn was trampled down,
And smoking hamlets marked
The deathly trail of warlike bands.
And time wore slowly on,
The victors of today, tomorrow slaves,
Then slaves grown stronger break their bonds
And thus a thousands years had passed,
Like created waves that roll on
To break along a rock-bound shore,
Then sink back silent in the vast abyss.
So had the noisy years for ages gone,
Scattered their fretful foam athwart the world,
And sunk to silence in the endless past.
A thousand years of war.
Oh sympathy ‘tis will thou canst not scan
With pitying eye the boundless world
Of woe the past hath known,
Else thou wouldst weep thine eyes away in grief,
And bless thy loss that thou no more could see…
Our schemes o’er thrown, enemies bolder grown,
Days without peace, and nights without repose,
Friends turning cold, aye, many cold in death,
Yet colder than the dead, are friends estranged,
All this and other ills not yet complete,
Do but destroy our inborn love of life,
And make most welcome that which endeth all.

It would appear that this poem captures the feelings of the Lamanite survivors after a thousand years of internal civil war, that saw no peace for fifty generations or more, one can see the result of the Lamanite conquest and total annihilation of the Nephite nation. The result was not peace, but as Moroni pointed out, continual and savage war. War that brought misery and constant attacks and battles among those who destroyed the earlier, at one time, righteous, nation.

Today, archaeologists and anthropologists call them Inca, a people who rose to power less than 100 years before the Spanish conquest of the Andean Plateau. But we know them as the Lamanites.