Why No Written Language in Peru

The Nephites wrote a reformed language of Egyptian characters on the sacred records, but were more familiar with their own Hebrew language (Moroni 9:32-34). They kept many written records (Helaman 3:13), but knew that if the Lamanites got their hands on those records, they would destroy them (Mormon 6:6), thus Mormon hid them up in the hill Cumorah, which was situated in the Land Northward, which was the land of his birth (Mormon 1:6). In 600B.C., Nephi tells us the record he wrote on the Plates was in the language of the Egyptian (1 Nephi 1:2), and 1000 years later, Moroni tells us that same language, though altered, was still being used on the plates (Mormon 9:32), and that “no other people knoweth our language” (Mormon 9:34).

Thus, when the Nephites were completely wiped out around 400 A.D., (Mormon 8:2,5,7;Moroni 1:2), what records were not hid up unto the Lord, were destroyed by the Lamanites, leaving no written record of the Nephites in the Land of Promise.

However, around 53 B.C., at least one ship left Hagoth’s shipyards along the West Sea at the Narrow Neck of Land heading in an unknown direction (Alma 63:8). Since others were known to head north, and south would have been toward Lamanite-held lands, the obvious course would have been west. Currents in that area would take ships toward Polynesia, and as Thor Heyerdahl showed, also to Easter Island.

Interestingly, there is a written script that showed up in archaeological work on Easter Island, called Rongorongo, the only written language in Oceania. This hieroglyphic script has remained a mystery since its discovery in 1860 by the first European missionary to work on the island, a French lay missionary named Eugène Eyraud—-who reported in a letter to his superior that he had seen there "in all the houses" hundreds of tablets and staffs incised with thousands of hieroglyphic figures.

Many attempts have been made to decipher the inscriptions, including Jaussen, Roussel, Metoro, Barthel, Mulloy, Skjølsvold, Smith, Carroll, Fischer, Thomson, and a plethora of others. But after many hundreds of attempts, perhaps thousands, the rongorongo script remains untranslatable. Might this be because the rongorongo script, like the “Reformed Egyptian” of the Book of Mormon, requires a gift of translation as Ammon told king Limhi regarding the seer Mosiah using the “interpreters” or urim and thumim to translate Ether’s record (Mosiah 8:13).

For over a hundred years, controversy has raged over the meaning and source of these enigmatic characters. Theories abound about the tablets and their text, with scholars disagreeing to even the nature of the writing on them, but the tablets as yet have never been deciphered. As Moroni said, “no other people knoweth our language.”