Ancient Writing on Metal Plates – Part III – The Conclusion

As has been shown in the last two posts, the once ridiculed story of Joseph Smith finding ancient records on metal plates buried in a stone box, has been shown in recent years to not only be believable, but a common practice in the ancient world of Mesopotamia and the Middle East from which the Lehi Colony emerged.

Not only have several of the ancient Old World metal plates been discovered in stone boxes, but it is apparent that in the New World stone boxes were also used to store valuables. In fact nearly fifty stone boxes have now been found in various locations throughout the world, including the Western Hemisphere. These New World stone boxes were used to preserve valuables such as jewelry, tapestries, tools, or clothing, and some of these stone boxes match Joseph Smith's description of the Book of Mormon box to surprising degrees.

It is also interesting that history speaks of the very fear that Mormon had when he wrote, “When we had gathered in all our people in one to the land of Cumorah, behold I, Mormon, began to be old; and knowing it to be the last struggle of my people, and having been commanded of the Lord that I should not suffer the records which had been handed down by our fathers, which were sacred, to fall into the hands of the Lamanites, (for the Lamanites would destroy them) therefore I made this record out of the plates of Nephi, and hid up in the hill Cumorah all the records which had been entrusted to me by the hand of the Lord, save it were these few plates which I gave unto my son Moroni” (Mormon 6:6).

In 213 B.C., Emperor Qin Shi Huang ordered the burning of all philosophy and history books outside the state of Qin, along with state archives, destroying all written records and damaging Chinese culture for centuries. According to the Zoroastrian cosmogony, when Alexander the Great defeated Darius III, he burned all the Zoroastrian Scriptures bringing upon himself the appellation Gojastak (the Damned). In 168 B.C., the Seleucid monarch Antiochus IV ordered Jewish Books of the Law found in Jerusalem to be rent in pieces and burned. Centuries of Sassenid history were burned by conquering Arab armies in 637 A.D., the invading Turks burned the Royal Library of the Samanid Dynasty in the 11^th century, and when the Mongols invaded Modlavia and Wallachia and then Transylvania in 1241, not only did tens of thousands of Romanians lose their lives with crops and goods plundered, but the Golden Horde destroyed all of the cultural and economic records from that period. Later, the Mongols invaded Baghdad in 1258, destroying the House of Wisdom along with all other libraries and it was said that the waters of the Tigris ran black for six months with ink from the enormous quantities of books flung into the river. 
According to the Madrid Codex, the fourth Aztec tlatoani (king) Itzcoatl (15^th century A.D.) ordered the burning of all historical codices, and when the Spanish conquistadors arrived, they burned and destroyed all Aztec and Mayan writings. In the 20^th century, when Germany invaded Poland, besides destroying 25 museums, 90,000 books of Polish culture, history and heritage were burned, including over 20,000 printed before 1800. The Nazi five-year "Säuberung" resulted in burning over 16,000,000 books, wiping out entire cultures of non-German societies. The Japanese invading China in World War II destroyed most of China’s libraries amounting to more than a million books. Conquering Iran burned every Kurdish book they could find in the late 1940s. During China’s 1960-1970s Cultural Revolution, the communist party there destroyed all genealogical records kept by every family totaling millions of destroyed records.

The list of people, groups, and entire nations destroying the records of previous nations and groups goes on and on. It is no wonder why no writings anywhere in the Americas survived, other than that written in stone in Mesoamerica and three codices there. The Lord well knew what would happen to the Nephite records if they were not hidden before the Lamanites annihilated their nation, and the later Spaniards destruction.

The metallic writings of the Nephite people, their books and records, which were many (Helaman 3:13) did not survive the conquering Lamanites other than those that were hidden by Mormon and the ones he gave to Moroni (Mormon 6:6).

When critics ask where the evidence of writing of the Nephites is found today, they might as well ask where are the milions upon millions of records, books, and writings that were destroyed throughout history by ignorant conquerors and self-righteous governments were now located. Had the Polish people been annihilated by Germany, as was their plan, we would know nothing of them from writings since Germany’s Verbrennungskommandos destroyed everything they found in an attempt to eradicate the Polish people and their history.

Thus, with the Spaniards’ attitude of destroying all knowledge within the Americas’ indigenous populations as being evidence of the devil in their cultures, New World examples of metal plates are infrequent, but not absent. In the thousands of years of recorded history in the world, ancient peoples have used various means of preserving their writings.

Left: Rongorongo writing from Easter Island on bark; Right: The Dead Sea Scrolls on parchment

Some have engraved their messages upon rock, others marked up clay tablets, which then were sun-baked, and still others used wood, cloth, leather, and bark, such as the surviving ancient Peruvian writing now called Rongorongo found on Easter Island. Because of Egyptian records preserved in desert climates, the records found in caves around the Dead Sea, and some other finds, the most frequent records of the ancients have been found on papyrus and stone.

For many years it was not known that ancient records were kept upon plates of metal.  However, in recent times archaeologists have discovered scores of instances where such metallic records were kept on copper, bronze and lead sheaths beaten into thin plates of various sizes. Sometimes alloys were added to make the metal very hard and durable, while some were engraved beautifully upon gold and silver.

As the critics have already demonstrated, the world of Joseph Smith did not believe that ancient records had ever been inscribed on metal plates or kept in stone boxes. Today, however, we have hundreds of examples of ancient writings on metal plates (and many stored in stone boxes), some of which date back as early as 2450 B.C. Hugh Nibley once said “...the discovery of writings on plates of precious metal, once the hardest thing to swallow in Joseph Smith's story, has become almost a commonplace in the Near East."