A Peruvian -Mesoamerican Legend: Leaving Tulan Bountiful – Part VIII

Continuing from the previous post regarding the legend that ties in South America to Mesoamerica and shows that the Peruvian Andes were the Book of Mormon home of the Nephites and that those who went north in Hagoth’s ships traveled to Mesoamerica.

One of the CHilam Balam books

    The Book Chilam Balam Of Mani were important books from Yucatan and also indicate that Bountiful-land was in the Tabasco-Chiapas region to the west of Yucatan. Though handwritten in the 17th and 18th centuries, and named after the small Yucatec towns (Chumayel, Mani, Tizimin, Na, Kaua, etc.) where they were originally kept, it is claimed they preserve important traditional knowledge in which indigenous Maya and early Spanish traditions have coalesced. They are written in the Yucatec Maya language and using the Latin alphabet, the manuscripts are attributed to a legendary author called Chilam Balam--Chilam meaning a priest who gives prophecies, and Balam is a common surname meaning "Juaguar." 
    It is claimed the chronicle summarizes Maya history from 150 A.D. down to 1611 A.D., and was taken from reliable and authentic hieroglyphic sources (Daniel Brinton, The Maya Chronicles, 1882, pp 95-99; M. Wells Jakeman, The Origins and
History of the Mayas, 1945, p 186).

The record says that these first settlers were “holy men” who left their homeland, Tuyapan (Bountiful-land) to settle there (in Yucatan). This work claims these early settlers came from the west of Yucatan in an area of nine rivers.
    “They departed from their home Nonoval at the west Zuiva. The land from whence they came was Tulapan and they arrived here” (in Yucatan). This suggests that these people who Mesoamerican scholars identify as Nephites left an area (Nonoval at the west of Zuiva) where they had lived to migrate to Yucatan. Before that, they (originally) came from a land called Tulapan which is translated as Bountiful. The chronicle of Mani refers to Tutulxiu (Bountiful-Plant-Land) as their “ancient homeland.”
    While many scholars try to place both Nonoval and Tulapan as the same place, the actual wordage of the Chronicle of Mani shows that they are separate places. One (Nonoval) was where the settlers migrated from (their home) to Yucatan, the other (Tulapan/”Bountiful”) was “the land from which they (originally) came.”
    This again fits the Hagoth emigrants, who originally came from the land of Bountiful (Alma 63:5) and landed in Mesoamerica, then after a time, some of these Nephites (Nahautl) left where they had settled (Nonoval) and migrated to Yucatan.
    There are some mystifying incongruities and irregularities in Mesoamerica considering all the research that has been carried out in Central America by those searching for Book of Mormon proofs and validations. As an example:
Narrow Neck of Land: One would think that the early historians of Mesoamerica would give some mention to a physical landmark that was so prominent as to be mentioned numerous times in the ancient Nephite record, like the narrow neck of land. Over the years a combination of feverish investigation and research in Central Mexico and the Yucatan peninsula has resulted in these areas being almost completely studied by the scientists, artists, sociologists, anthropologists and interested tourists.

An ancient map of the Americas shows the Mesoamerican area as a more or less straight area, showing no specific indentation, suggesting that the early settlers of the area did not realize what later peoples came to know through aerial and satellite photography

Yet, in this mass of information and interpretation there is virtually nothing about the immensely important narrow strip of land that is the bridge between the Nephite Land Northward and Land Southward—the area most Mesoamerican Theorists call the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. This narrow neck of land, so predominantly mentioned and positioned in the Book of Mormon, around which northern migration, settlement and wars abound, is totally ignored in the histories of the ancient writers of Mesoamerican settlers.

Even a relatively modern map does not show a specific indentation for the isthmus of Tehuantepec, again suggesting that people of the area were unaware or unimpressed by any suggestive narrowness of this area—hardly what early recorders would have termed “a narrow neck of land”

And no wonder, for this Mesoamerican isthmus is 145 miles wide with the west coast barely indented, and except for a modern map or satellite picture, can hardly be discerned.
Mother Culture: Mesoamerican theorists lay claim to an ancient history of a people they call the Olmec, in the area of Vera Cruz, often referring to this as the mother culture, the archaeological treasures that lie hidden in the jungles and under the rich soils of this area, including “pyramids, masterfully carved colossal monuments of basalt, splendid statuettes of precious jade, and sensitively modeled gurines (statuette) of clay, which are “all of an unprecedented high artistic quality”—is all the more puzzling because of its lack of antiquitous (early, ancient) development.

That is, this tantalizing presence of a great and remote past in what is now uninhabited, impenetrable jungle is all the more perplexing because most archaeologists now agree that many of these artistic masterpieces date back only to the beginnings of the Christian era (Laura Kennedy, Roots traced back to glyphs of Mexico’s Olmec civilization, MSNBC Science Report, December 5, 2002 (2002 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science).
    These statuettes evidently appeared suddenly out of nowhere in a state of full development, constituting a culture that seems to have been the root, the mother culture, from which the later and better-known cultures sprang, but dating only to about the first century A.D. (Miguel Covarrubias, Mexico South -- the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, 1946, pp 79-80).
    Full development suggests that this culture, whose artifacts and remains date from the first century B.C. onward, came out of nowhere, with little if any to show the so-called scientific developmental areas (earlier developmental artifacts and remains of cultural growth). And this “mother culture” is said to have been the beginning from which all others (Toltecs, Totonac, Maya, Zapotec, Aztec, etc.), sprang. This original people, sometimes referred to as the Olmecs (Jaredites) or the Nahuatls (Nephites), whose histories and accomplishments seem interwoven, if not confused, at times by the scholars, spread across Mesoamerica, yet leaving only fragments of “evidence” of their existence until around the first century B.C.

It just so happens that this is when Hagoth’s immigrants sailed to a land which was northward, on at least four voyages in the last century B.C. 

From that point on, “hard” evidence abounds in the artifacts and stone monuments of which Miguel Covarrubias writes. But could this “mother culture,” instead of being the original Jaredite or Nephite colonies as various Mesoamerican scholars claim, have been Hagoth’s emigrants? This curious man, who built exceedingly large ships that sailed northward full of emigrants, launched his vessels into the west sea from the narrow neck area called the Land of Bountiful (Alma 63:5). Could this Bountiful, that bordered on the land of Desolation at the narrow neck, be Tulan as recorded in the 16th century text?
    Evidence of actual sites, monuments, stone carvings, etc., found in Mesoamerica, all date during and after the first century B.C., with very little dating as early as that century (all references to previous stages of development follow the typical anthropological status for civilizations and is more opinion and speculation than any evidential factors, i.e., models of assumed developmental). Most of these cities, whose magnificence tantalized Covarrubias, date much later, most after 200 A.D. The beginning of the area of Teotihuacan is dated from 300 A.D., and the settlers came from the south (Mexico South, pp79-80), not the east which would have been a homeland in Arabia or Jerusalem.
    These early references, the construction sites and artifacts found to that are so dated, all originated from the “ancient mother culture” of Mesoamerica (Mathew W. Stirling, Discovering the New World’s Oldest Dated Work of Man, National Geographic, August 1939, p 183). A culture that, except for archaeological and anthropological models of “assumed developmental stages of diffusion” date from no earlier than the first century B.C.—the time of Hagoth’s emigrant landings. 
    Ancient documents, referred to as codices, existed in Mesoamerica at the time of the Conquest. Many of the early writers, listing the legends and myths of the Maya, claimed there existed knowledge and records of the Genesis creation among the ancient colonizers of Central America who were still in the possession of the Maya in Guatemala when the Titulo de Totonicapan codex was written in 1554. Both the Ixtlilxochitl and the Lords of Totonicapan codices corroborate each other about the creation account.

Titulo de los Senores de Totonicapan, a 16th-century record about the Quiche-Mayas of ancient Guatemala, The Totonicapan, calls the first settlers “sages,” and the name used, Nahuales, resembles Nephites—the term Nahuas was in use at the time of Cortez. This record claims the Nahuales came “from the Orient” meaning they came from across the sea, from “Civan-Tulan” which means Bountiful. They were descendants of Israel, the sons of Abraham and Jacob, whose ancestors came from Bountiful at the confines of Babylonia. 
    Popol Vuh claims the early settlers came from the other side of the sea. It claims the hearts of these settlers in Mesoamerica mourned when they left Tulan. This work, which is highly acclaimed and quoted by Mesoamerican Theorists, was re-written around the end of the 16th century since the original had disappeared long before—as the author of the reworked material claimed that “he was providing the best substitution he could for the original, which is the life of the Quiche, because no longer can be seen the book of the Popol Vuh, which the kings had in olden times, for it has disappeared” (Adrian Recinos, Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Ancient Qiche Maya, with the English version by Sylvanus G. Morley and Delia Goet, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman OK, 1950, pp 234-235).
(See the next post, “A Peruvian -Mesoamerican Legend: Leaving Tulan Bountiful –  Part IX,” for more on this original legend and the tie-in to Peru)