A reader of this blog wrote in recently with this
interesting, if not misguided, claim to bolster his view that the Malay
Peninsula was the Land of Promise. While we have answered that claim several
times, specifically in a lengthy series, this particular segmented question was not then raised and seems
to deserve a specific answer.
Comment: “Dragons
were indigenous to the Komodo Islands (Komodo Dragon) near the Malay Peninsula
which shows that the comment “fighting like dragons” in the Book of Mormon (Msh
20:11; Alma 43:44) indicates to me that they had actually seen dragons fight
and had drawn pictures of them on the gold plates. If Book of Mormon people
were on the Malay Peninsula, they could have been familiar with dragons. The Americas
had none. The Book of Mormon also reports lions in flocks of sheep (3 Ne 20:16;
21:12; Msh 20:10). There were no lions or domesticated sheep in America during
Book of Mormon times. They were Old World animals. The accounts preferentially
support Mala. According to B.H. Roberts, the dog was apparently the only domesticated
animal in Book of Mormon times in Mesoamerica, and he claims it was very
valuable for transportation, hunting, guarding, companionship and for food. One
would expect very favorable reference to dogs, therefore, in the Book of
Mormon. Instead we find only two derogatory comments (3 Ne 7:8; 14:6) such as a
dog turning to his vomit and keeping holy matters away from dogs. The comments
seem inappropriate for a Meso setting. Also, the jaguar, a very large American
feline, was of special symbolic and religious significance in ancient
Mesoamerica and jaguar statues are found at many ziggurat (temple?) structures.
In preferential support of a Land of Promise in the Old World, there is no
reference to jaguars in the Book of Mormon” Brinkman.
Response: Let’s take your comments one at a time: 1) Dragons. First of all, there were not
pictures drawn on the gold plates. Second, stories of dragons have been handed down for generations in
many civilizations. Dragons are featured in the ancient Gilgamesh Epic, a
Sumerian story from about 3000 B.C., while Daniel was said to kill a dragon in
the apocryphal chapters of the Bible, then after Alexander the Great invaded
India he brought back reports of seeing a great hissing dragon living in a
cave, and later Greek rulers supposedly brought live dragons from Ethiopia. A
“Dinosaur” entry in Microsoft Encarta explains that the historical references
to dinosaur bones may extend as far back as the 5th century BC. In fact, some
scholars think that the Greek historian Herodotus was referring to fossilized
dinosaur skeletons and eggs when he described griffins guarding nests in
central Asia. “Dragon bones” mentioned in a 3rd century A.D. text from China
are thought to refer to bones of dinosaurs. The Chinese have many stories of
dragons, with some ornamental pictures of dragons shaped remarkably like
dinosaurs. Marco Polo wrote of his travels to the province of Karajan and
reported on huge serpents, which “at the fore part have two short legs, each
with three claws, and the jaws are wide enough to swallow a man, the teeth are
large and sharp, and their whole appearance is so formidable that neither man,
nor any kind of animal can approach them without terror.” 
St. George, in the 3rd
century A.D. was, according to tradition, a Roman soldier from Syria, Palaetina
and a soldier in the Guard of Diocletian, one of the most prominent military
saints, and one of the 14 holy helpers, who was immortalized in the tale of Saint George and the Dragon. St. John of
Damascus, an eastern monk who wrote in the 8th century, gives a sober account
of dragons, insisting that they are mere reptiles and did not have magical
powers. In medieval times, the Scandinavians described swimming dragons and the
Vikings placed dragons on the front of their ships to scare off the sea
monsters. Ancient explorers and historians, like Josephus, told of small flying
reptiles in ancient Egypt and Arabia and described their predators, the ibis,
stopping their invasion into Egypt. Evolutionary Zoologist Desmond Morris
wrote, “In the world of fantastic animals, the dragon is unique. No other
imaginary creature has appeared in such a rich variety of forms. It is as
though there was once a whole family of different dragon species that really
existed, before they mysteriously became extinct. The atheistic astronomer Carl
Sagan once remarked: “The pervasiveness of dragon myths in the folk legends of
many cultures is probably no accident.” We also find that Roman dragons evolved from serpentine
Greek ones, combined with the dragons of the Near East, in the mix that
characterized the hybrid Greek/Eastern Hellenistic culture. From Babylon, the muš-ḫuššu was a classic representation of a dragon on the Ishtar Gate of
ancient Babylon. 
The
restored Ishtar Gate leading into ancient Babylon, with Unicorns and Dragons
worked into the tile reliefs. Right: Closeup of the muš-ḫuššu
dragon with fire coming of its mouth
John's Book of Revelation—Greek literature, not
Roman—describes Satan as "a great dragon, flaming red, with seven heads
and ten horns." Much of John's literary inspiration is late Hebrew and
Greek, but John's dragon is more likely to have come originally through the
Near East. Perhaps the distinctions between dragons of western
origin and Chinese dragons are arbitrary, since the later Roman dragon was
certainly of Iranian origin: in the Roman Empire, where each military cohort
had a particular identifying signum, (military standard), after the
Parthian (Iran, Medes, Assyrians) and Dacian (Romania) Wars of Trajan in the
east, the Dacian Draco military standard entered the Legion with the Cohors Sarmatarum and Cohors Dacorum (Sarmatian and Dracian
cohorts)—a large dragon fixed to the end of a lance, with large
gaping jaws of silver and with the rest of the body formed of colored silk.
With the jaws facing into the wind, the silken body inflated and rippled,
resembling a windsock. This signum is described in the surviving epitome
of Vegetius De Re Militari 379 A.D.—"The
first sign of the entire legion is the eagle, which the eagle-bearer carries.
In addition, dragons are carried into battle by each cohort, by the
'dragoneers'"—and in Ammianus Marcellinus, Parthia lies across the Silk
Road, the cultural thread between East and West, allowing for
possible connections between this Romanized Parthian dragon and distant Chinese
origins. Several vague incarnations of evil in the Old Testament were given the
translation draco in Jerome’s Vulgate, to undergo changes in meaning and
become broad embodiments of evil.
Top LtoR: St.George killing the dragon; a
Hungarian knight with a dragon on his shield; the Celt Dragon Pennant; the
Roman Dragon; Center: LtoR: Duchy of Czersk Poland Coat of Arms; The Pendragon
symnbol of Wales; The Military Order of the Dragon; The Roman Signum that carried
the Dragon into battle; Bottom LtoR: While the Red Dragon was the symbol of the
Byzantine Empire, the White Dragon was the symbol of England before they
adopted the White Cross for the Crusades (Queen Victoria’s Seal was a
two-headed dragon; Sarmatian Roman waving his Draco
All of this is submitted to show that the use of a dragon
for fighting, and as a symbol of power, has been around in numerous countries,
peoples and cultures since the third millennium B.C. It is simply not possible
to isolate the use of an idiom (fighting like dragons) and place it with any
one specific area of the world. It belongs to most peoples, places and times.
As an additional thought, in the early Christian religion, Satan was symbolized
as a dragon. When I was much younger, we used to talk about people “fighting
like the devil.”
As for the term “Komodo Dragon,” which you used, the Komodo dragon is also known as the "Komodo monitor" or the
"Komodo Island monitor" in scientific literature, although this is not
very common. It is a monitor (large carnivorous lizard) of the lizard species.
To the natives of Komodo
Island, it is referred to as ora, buaya darat (land crocodile) or
biawak raksasa (giant monitor). They are carnivores, although they eat
mostly carrion, and are considered a vulnerable species. They live entirely on
the islands of Gili Motang, Gili Dasami, Rinca, Komodo and Flores—in the West
Manggarai Regency in the western portion of the major island of Nusa Tenggara
Timur in the Savu Sea south of Indonesia and nearly 1300 miles southeast of the
tip of Malay, Peninsula in the Lesser Sunda Islands. The Komodo dragon is basically
a docile animal, though when their territory is invaded they can become
aggressive and unpredictable. However, they tend to hunt in packs and their
group behavior is exceptional in the reptile world—none of which suggests a
term “fighting like a dragon”
(See the next post, “Fighting Like Dragons – Part II - Sheep, Lions, Jaguars
and Dogs,” for the rest of this response)
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