More Comments to be Answered Part I

Here are some more comments that we’ve received from this website blog.

Comment #1: “You have said many times that Cusco was the home of Nephi, or the City of Nephi. What do you base this upon?” Redondo

Response:  It is based upon several things, including distance from the Land of First Inheritance, the higher elevation (Mosiah 7:2-4), that it sits in a mountain valley with hills around it (Mosiah 7:5-6), there is a solid, almost impregnable fortress overlooking the valley, where a temple of some significance once stood (2 Nephi 5:16), and near it the tower mentioned in Mosiah, to which King Noah fled and Gideon chased him upon (Mosiah 19:5-6), from which he could see some distance and view an approaching army entering the valley (Mosiah 6-7), all of which existed when the Spanish arrived (this has all been pointed out in detail in earlier posts).

View from tower area of Cuzco Valley. Left: Looking southeast at eastern entrance from the south into the valley; Right: Looking southwest at southern entrance into the valley (upper right break in mountains). Far to the right is the entrance into the valley from the west. All of this can easily be seen from the tower area

At this site, next to where the temple once stood, of which Garcilaso de la Vega played within as a child and wrote about in his famous Comentarios Reales de los Incas, published in Lisbon in 1609, was the tower. In fact, there were three in an area now called Muyuq Marka ("round place") where when the Spanish arrived, “there were three strong towers disposed in a triangle. The main tower, Muyuq Marka was in the middle and had a circular shape. The second one was named as Paucar Marca, and the third Sallaq Marka.”

All that is left of the tower once the Spaniards had finished tearing it down and destroying it, is this base complex of one round foundation and two square ones. Builders today say this foundation would have easily held a five-story building

This area consists of three concentric, circular stone wall foundations connected by a series of radial walls, with three channels constructed to bring water into what might have been a reservoir, and a web-like pattern of 34 lines intersecting at the center. Uninformed visitors and misguided tourist guides try to claim this was built as it now is to form the “eye of the Puma.” However, the Spanish chroniclers refer to it as the tower location and the foundations of the three towers that stood here when the Spanish arrived.

Comment #2: “I am enjoying your books, thanks. I was just watching the documentary channel and wondered if your work mentions: The Mysterious Stone Monuments of Markawasi Peru. I noticed that the folks doing the show had no BOM knowledge to answer the questions they had...too bad” Brian C.

Rock formations at Marakawasi, Peru, a 13,000-foot high plateau about 2.5 square miles that originated from volcanic reaction. Located east of Lima, Peru, it is a large tourist attraction because of these huge granite rocks with curious shapes resembling human faces, animals, and religious symbols

Response: Thank you for your inquiry. But no, my work does not involve the so-called mysterious stone monuments of Markawasi, Peru. I try to stay away from controversial matters that have no explanation or direct connection to the Book of Mormon. While these images may be man-made, they just as well could be accidents of nature. In fact, many visitors to the area report their belief that the unusual shapes formed naturally through erosion. On the other hand, many believe they were man made, from an ancient culture to such things as alien visitors. As a side comment, when I was a kid, I used to lay out on my front lawn with a friend and we would see what images we could make out of the clouds--some were so realistic it was easy to see what they looked like, others you had to stretch your imagination. The Mars images show a huge face in the ground, but it is unlikely it was man made...more likely a simple matter of shadows and angles. As an artist, I can find images in many natural places and have over the years made a sort of game out of looking for such things, especially when my kids came along we would go for drives in the hills and mountains and I'd point out some images and then they would. Nature has a way of making its work look real.

Comment #3: “I think it is remarkably interesting that we still cannot overcome our superiority complex as a society and continue to attempt to try and demean the work of past communities by attempting to attribute such magnificent achievement to some sort of outside influence, like aliens, etc. Is it so difficult to accept that the people that came before us may have had techniques and knowledge that surpasses our own? Think of the Tower at Babylon and the hanging gardens built around 2200 B.C., or the great pyramids, even the Great Wall of China. Perhaps we are just so conceited as a people that we still cannot accept anyone who came before us could possibly have a greater understanding of the world and could be able to create structures and monuments we marvel at even today” The Thinker.

Top Left: HMS Resolution on Cook’s first voyage; Top Right: Captain James J. Cook; Bottom Left: The double-hulled Polynesian canoes; Bottom Right: Cook killed by natives in Hawaii on his third voyage

Response: Well said. It reminds me of when Captain James Cook reached Polynesia in 1769 and saw the indigenous people there with their rickety canoes (compared to his much larger sailing ship) and could not accept the fact that the people he saw could sail the oceans without difficulty; however, once he saw them in their canoes sailing with great dexterity, he changed his mind. In fact, most historians, even today, cannot accept the fact that early people sailed from South America to Easter Island, or to Polynesia, believing they had to have island-hopped from the far west across the many islands over long periods of time, to finally reach Polynesia and eventually Easter Island, even when the Easter Islanders told the early Europeans who “discovered” them that their fathers had come from the east (South America). It is also interesting that however hard we try to paint it, we are not the pinnacle of human existence, humanity and evolution is not on a teleological scale and to attempt to label the ancient Andean cultures as having 'simple' technology and 'unable' to create these fantastic pieces of archeology when they clearly have more substantial evidence for their creation than aliens cracking whips is just close minded, arrogant and insulting to the people who built Tiahuanaco, Sacsayhuaman, Ollantaytambo, Kuelap, and numerous other magnificent sites.

Comment #4: “Someone said in a class recently that the Lamanites in the last century B.C. were controlled by Nephite defectors, not pure Lamanites. Is that true?” Barbra V.

Response: It would appear that way from the scriptural record. Around this time it was the Nephite apostates and their descendants who took over the rule of the Lamanite people, for when the Lamanite king was killed in 73 B.C., he was replaced by Amalickiah, an apostate Nephite, and later by his lineage, Amalickiah, Ammoron and Tubaloth.