Several of our
readers have asked about there being no wheel or evidence of wheels found in
use in the Americas before the Spanish arrived, so how can we justify the idea
of chariots, etc. in the Book of Mormon.
The Lamanites have hunted my people, the
Nephites, down from city to city and from place to place, even until they are
no more; and great has been their fall; yea, great and marvelous is the
destruction of my people, the Nephites
It is interesting how
this idea of there never having been the wheel in Peru got started. Just
because the Indians, 1000 years after the demise of the Nephite Nation, who
spent most of their time in constant civil wars, one tribe against another, and where
there is no record of their having built or invented anything, and in the
beginning wanted to destroy everything Nephite, there are those who think the
wheel should have survived. Naturally, not one of us today would think the
surviving Lamanites would not want to have the wheel, but that is our view today.
It was not their view then—their desire was to eradicate the Nephites and all
signs of the Nephites, since only in that way could they rightfully claim
ownership by inheritance of a land that had been promised to the Nephites, but in their minds should have gone to their forefathers (Laman and Lemuel).
While we may not
understand this in our day and age where such things are not part of our world,
the right of the first born (bekhor)
male, called Primogeniture were reflected in the norms of ancient Israelite society,
since Biblical legislation gave a “right of possession” to the first son born
to the father, who then occupied a prominent place in the Hebrew family
(Genesis 27:19; 35:23; 41:51; 2 Samuel 3:2). Thus, the firstborn male held a
special status with respect to inheritance rights and certain cultic
regulations, including having rank over his brothers and sisters (Genesis
26:31,32; 43:33). Usually the father bequeathed to him the greater part of the
inheritance, except when a favored wife succeeded in obtaining it for one of
her sons (Genesis 26; 1 Kings 11:11-13). In early days the will of the father
fixed the part of the chief heir, but the law of Deuteronomy demands for him a
double portion of all the possessions and forbids favor being shown to a younger
son (Deuteronomy 21:15-17).
This anger of the
Lamanites toward Nephi (for Laman was the first born son, not Nephi, and
everything would have been his, and theirs by inheritance, such as the right to rule, possession of the
Liahona, sacred plates, sword of Laban, and ownership of the land), which anger
and subsequent hatred fed from father to son (Mosiah 10:12-13; 16-17), lasted all the generations of the
Nephite Nation until the Lamanites succeeded in wiping them out to the man.
However, from that point onward, the Lamanites were involved in civil wars for
many years (Mormon 8:8; Moroni 1:2), and by the time any cessation of the wars ended or diminished in their
intensity, much of whatever infrastructure that once existed in the Land of
Promise, including crops, orchards, herds and flocks, would have been very
thin, if not wiped out altogether.
Food would have been
at a premium, with wild game long eradicated except for the most hardy and
adept at hiding in the wild. Obviously, almost all of the domestic animals
would have been early dispatched for food to feed constantly fighting warriors
and entire armies. Where anyone thinks all the food for at least 36 years of
constant and heavy wars came from is beyond me, but whatever reserves there
once might have been, it would have been long gone in the first few years of the
wars. While industrial nations can usually handle food supplies, agrarian
societies run out of crops and food quite quickly during extended wars as was
seen in World War II when many of the small, inept European countries resorted
to all sorts of inhumane activities just to stay alive, eating garbage,
animals, even rats, and eventually humans.
It would not have
been a pretty picture, but for those who might have thought little on the
subject, and wonder where all the animals would have gone, domestic animals are
the first to go as soldiers move through a land constantly fighting. A chicken,
an egg, dogs, in fact, anything that lives, can be killed and eaten by a near-starved military force, not to mention any civilians that might be left in
the land.
Consequently, for
those who need to rethink their opinions about this period between 385 A.D. and
421 A.D., when we know that there was constant civil war throughout the land
that seemed to go on forever, according to Moroni, 36 years would have
devastated any infrastructure that would have existed. For those on the coast,
whenever the wars ended, if they ever really did, there was fishing, but for
those inland, it would have been a difficult life until they could get some
type of crops growing again, if any still had the knowledge to do so,
especially if the wars between the Lamanbites involved entire families like the
Nephites in their final battles (Mormon 6:7) and the Jaredites before them (Ether 15:15).
After 30 years of war:
Crops that have been planted and replanted but left unattended because of the
violent and extensive wars, finally fail, slowly turning into grasslands
After 50 years: Sea
life thrives from lack of fishing and overfishing; fields that once grew
abundant crops are by expanding forests, with dirt blown by winds settling and
packing into layers that build up; metal is exposed to oxidation and
disintegration; large animals increase in numbers, kill off large numbers of
smaller, domesticated cats, dogs and farm animals. Buildings are inundated with
rain water that seeps into cracks in stone columns, pillars, and walls, and
then it freezes in winter before thawing again in springs—the repeated cycles
split and crack the stones, rock and concrete, with support columns giving way and the roofs
collapse.
After 75 Years: Buildings
topple. Upper floors rain down, smashing lower floors until the buildings
crumble to the ground; whatever ships are still afloat and not destroyed at sea
from lack of care, wash ashore. Dog breeds cease to exist with generations of
free reproduction; all metal completely disintegrates and disappears; as the wars
wind down, some people begin to herd llama and alpaca, rounding them into
protected enclaves. Ruined chariots that line the roads disintegrate, their
wooden wheels long inoperative and crumbling, along with their wooden axles and
tongues. Once proud horses used to pull the vehicles, long dead, have been
picked clean to the bone by first starving warriors and people, and then by
animals and carrion
After 100 years: All fruit,
vegetable and grain crops have disappeared, and all wheat crops have withered
away; man-made objects have disintegrated into nothing; all effort by people to
replant and cultivate plants fails from lack of knowledge and experience; and the
hot dry winds of the deserts drive people further and further into the
mountains where quinoa and Kaniwa grow wild, their seeds life-sustaining. The
dead from the lengthy wars are nothing but bleached bones, that even now are
disintegrating except in the hot, dry areas.
After 150 years:
Wolves increase in numbers, come in contact with feral dogs competing with them
for food or breeding with them, erasing the last traces of domestication, hot
desert winds bring sands to cover buildings, cities, bones and villages; larger
animals like jaguars and cougars expand, and almost all small animals cease to
exist. Thick growth of trees and undergrowth claim most of the eastern slopes
of the tall mountains, expanding the Amazonian flora further west. Trees grow
thick and tall in protected inter-Andean valleys, but winds sweep clean all
growth on the altiplano, and the high plateaus. All vestiges of numerous small
villages have completely vanished in a land that once boasted millions of
people, only enclaves of large cities, their skeletal structures dotting the
land, remain—their ghosts long gone and not a soul to remember who they were or
the vast skills they possessed as they subdued the entire Andean shelf from
southern Chile to southern Colombia.
After 200 years: Only
a few hotspots of war and an occasional battle is heard over the Andean
mountains and valleys as fewer and fewer men exist to continue a war in which
none were left knowing why they fought. It had become a way of life, and women
now outnumbered the men nearly ten to one. Populatoin centers had long ago
disappeared and fewer and fewer births supplemented the ranks of armies that
once number in the hundreds of thousands. There are some statesmen beginning to
come into the land that talk about peace and try to unite groups into larger
tribes and multiple family units, but most are killed by still angry warriors
who have no idea why their anger exists.
After 250 years: All
semblance of modern man has disappeared from the entire western shelf of the
continent; clothes are no longer being made, even in rudimentary form. The
natives return to breechcloths and vests, the women to short tunics, and all
settling into individual tribes made up of family units, separating themselves
into small enclaves of humanity scattered up and down the western coastal area,
living mostly in the middle high valleys, though a few still live along the
coastal areas north of what is now Lima, Peru. Man recovers from nearly 250
years of wars and warfare and starts to settle down once again—though the vast
majority of males lie dead and scattered across the land from the lengthy wars
that have left the remainder weary of people they do not know and develop
strong ties within their own “tribes.”
Across the vast lands
of hills, valleys and mountains, there was not a single sign of a once
advanced, God-fearing people who had built one of the world’s vast empires
within these mountains.
Only an occasional
city, crumbling under the centuries of inattention, most unusable, many buried
over the centuries by moving earth, searing heat, and strong winds, with not a
single individual left alive that knew who had built them and when, nor what
happened to them. Nor even were there any still alive who had even the slimmest
memory of the great final wars their 8th great grandfathers had won
to rid themselves of their hereditary enemies so many years before, or the
destructive rampage the next two generations had bent upon in ridding all
vestiges of that once powerful enemy, until now, no one knew, no one
remembered, and no one cared.
(See the next post, “Did the Nephites
Have the Wheel—What Happened to the Nephite Evidences? – Part II,” as we return
to the question of the wheel that traversed 27,000 miles of roads)
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