Indeed, Scratch makes his usual disingenuous hash of the arguments of those with whom he disagrees here, as DCP and Hamblin hold there own more than adaquately against their opponents on this thread.
Hamblin, for example, makes the following point:
There are numberous empirical facts about ancient Mesoamerica which correspond with the Book of Mormon. The Book of Mormon describes cities, writing, towers, trade, agriculture, warfare, etc. The problem is how can we identify them as Book of Mormon cities, as opposed to some other type of city. There is only one solution to this problem. Contemporary inscriptions which give the pronunciation of toponyms, ethnonyms, or peronsal names. For simpliciity's sake, we can limit the question to the Jaredites. Based on contemporary inscriptions, what was pronunciation of the the ancient name for the people now called Olmec by archaeologist? What was the ancient pronunciation of the cities now called San Lorenzo and La Venta? What was the pronunciation of the names of their major kings? Is such data available? If not, how can we test the possibility of a relationship between the Book of Mormon/Jaredites and the Olmec? The problem is not that the Book of Mormon fails this type of test. It is that this type of test is not possible because of insufficient data. If we had hundreds of toponyms, ethnonyms and personal names, it would be possible to test the Book of Mormon in this regard. We don't. So, rather than proclaiming that the Book of Mormon fails this test, we should instead test the Book of Mormon in cases where we do have sufficient data to make a viable test.
Faced with this, Gervin responds with a set of potential problems with Book of Mormon historicity, among which are:
The "facts" that you briefly list, above, are probably true for dozens or perhaps hundreds of locations between Cape Horn and Thunder Bay. Then there is the problem of Book of Mormon facts that go completely against what is known of Mesoamerica - I'm sure you're familiar with that list. Then there are the facts about Mesoamerica that are completely missing from the Book of Mormon (references to other populations, references to the known flora and fauna of the region, etc). I don't think your correspondences hold up very well in light of these other facts.
The lack of correspondences to Book of Mormon cities is a problem, but only one of many problems. The utter lack of any record of Book of Mormon culture is a problem. Another problem is a lack of verification of a single Book of Mormon event.
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There is only one solution to this problem. Contemporary inscriptions which give the pronunciation of toponyms, ethnonyms, or peronsal names.
Why do these have to be contemporary? What clues do the known mesoamerican inscriptions provide with regard to the Book of Mormon cities, culture, religion, wars, fortificaitons, steel production, ship building, record keeping, conflagrations, etc., etc.?
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For simpliciity's sake, we can limit the question to the Jaredites. Based on contemporary inscriptions, what was pronunciation of the the ancient name for the people now called Olmec by archaeologist? What was the ancient pronunciation of the cities now called San Lorenzo and La Venta? What was the pronunciation of the names of their major kings? Is such data available? If not, how can we test the possibility of a relationship between the Book of Mormon/Jaredites and the Olmec?
Why assume any relationship in the first place? Why the Olmec? The problem is not that the Book of Mormon fails this type of test. It is that this type of test is not possible because of insufficient data. There certainly is a lot of data that comes out of mesoamerica. Is there a basis for deeming it insufficient for testing against the Book of Mormon? Seems more like a conclusion of convenience than one of fact.
To which Beowulf supplies a broad based but salient observation:
Gervin apparently believes that Book of Mormon evidence in PreClassical Mesoamerica should include thousands of items of evidence, containing word-for-word lift-offs from the Book of Mormon. The reality is that virtually NO evidence of writing in Preclassical Mesoamerica has ever been found.
This is not to say that such writing did not exist. Enough has been found to show that it did INDEED exist, but not enough to flesh out a history based on texts.
People who study ancient mideastern texts, on the other hand, do have enough to flesh out histories, of a sort. (Since the book I am currently reading uses just such texts, I think that I can tell the difference. And if you must know, the person who wrote this book, William Hamblin by name, also knows the difference... Despite being a laughable LDS scholar who only "sits back and whines that no one takes them seriously". rolleyes.gif )
Along these same lines, I noted that Gervin was demanding that archeological evidence in Mesoamerica demonstrate a paradigm shift when the Lehites show up. Since it does not (according to him) no such migration took place. The thought occurred to me that the same analysis can be applied to Biblical archeology. The Bible plainly states that Canaan was invaded by a large mass of Israelites who blotted out the locals and installed themselves in the cities, complete with a New God and New Culture. But the archeological evidence shows no such thing happening. The time period (around 1200bce) shows no evidence of razed cities, of a shift in religion (there are Mother in Heaven figurines found scattered about before and after), or of a new culture.
And this in a small area where archeologists supposedly know exactly where to look!
Moreover, the Egyptians, who kept marvelously detailed records (as I have found from the above book) somehow managed to completely overlook 400 years of Israelites in Egypt.
When things in the Bible are so hard to pin down, in an area that has been combed over so well, how much more difficult when the sites on the ground are not pinpointed, as in Book of Mormon archeology in Mesoamerica?
The contrast between the two is not as far apart as Gervin and friends want us to believe.
Hamblin gets back to some of these themes later, even though not responding to Gavin directly that I could find. He does put both The Dude (whose limited understanding of these issue is glaring here), and Addicto (who, Scratch and Fortigurn-like, engages in an open ended semantic game over the term 'empirical) in their places at the back of the class regarding the same issues, However:
Here are some notes comparing the relative availability of textual data in the ancient Near East vs. Preclassic Mesoamerica.
“Texts, the primary source for the historian, have survived in the hundreds of thousands. … More important, however, was the clay tablet, the medium of writing that developed in southern Mesopotamia and was adopted by all Near Eastern cultures. It has amazing durability in the dry soil of the region … The survival of numerous documents of daily use distinguishes the ancient Near East from other ancient cultures. In Egypt, Greece, and Rome, similar things were written, but on parchment and papyrus, materials that have survived in unusual conditions only.” (Van de Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East, 2nd ed. (2007) 4-5)
Compare this with the paucity of texts from Preclassic Mesoamerica (Sharer, Ancient Maya, 5 ed. 86-8, 117). In my personal opinion this paucity may be because Preclassic monumental inscriptions were generally painted on flat surfaces rather than inscribed, and the paint has not survived 1500 years. In general see Marcus, Mesoamerican Writing Systems (Princeton, 1992) and Oxford Encyclopedia of Mesoamerican Cultures (hereafter OEMC) 3:338-50.
“Written records [in Preclassic Mesoamerica] very likely were also kept on perishable material such as bark paper, like that used in later times” (Sharer, 86-8 ). Even if Dude finds it incredible, none of these texts have survived from Preclassic or Classic times: “far older books dating to the Classic or even Preclassic have all apparently succumbed to the ravages of time” (Sharer 599). About two dozen Mesoamerican books (codex/codices) have survived from around the period around Spanish conquest (Bunson, Encyclopedia of Ancient Mesoamerica, 61-62, gives a list of major codices; OEMC has separate entries on most of these) Most of these codices survive in European museums where they were taken in colonial times. Only one of which I am aware, the Codex Grolier, was discovered in an archaeological setting; it was found in fragments in a dry cave, and is thought to date from the 13th century (OEMC 1:442-4). The earliest of these surviving Mesoamerican books date to nearly a thousand years after the Book of Mormon.
We have very few surviving texts from Preclassic Mesoamerica, compared to hundreds of thousands of texts from the ancient Near East. Furthermore, the phonetic component of place and personal names in the Maya script is generally not known, or uncertain at best. Why should Anti-Mormons claim that the two cases are in any way compatible, and provide a methodologically legitimate basis for comparison of the relative results.
Imagine two murder investigations, case A and case B. In case A we have DNA evidence under the fingernails of the victim, which can be positively matched with the DNA of suspect A. In case B, however, we have no DNA evidence from the victim or crime scene, even though we have the DNA of suspect B. Would anyone claim that, because we can match the DNA of suspect A with DNA from crime scene A, that we should also be able to match the DNA of suspect B with the DNA from crime scene B, even though we have no DNA from crime scene B? Isn’t such a claim manifestly impossible? Then why should we expect to be able to find the names of Preclassic Mesoamerican sites and kings without texts?
And, directly responding to some of The Dude's clearly not well thought out criticisms:
1- In ancient history there is no such thing as an "empirical."
2- As I've said several times before: I believe there is no way to establish ancient ethnicity, toponyms, personal names, royal dynasties, state names, gods, religion, belief, etc. without texts. If you disagree with this statement, show me an example of how it’s possible.
3- The pre-Hellenistic (c. 330 BC) ancient Near East has literally hundreds of thousands of times more written texts as does Pre-Classic Mesoamerica. It is absurd to claim that interpreting the evidence in these two cases is in any way methodologically equivalent. The argument made by Anti-Mormons here, that because we have lots of evidence from the Ancient Near East which allows us to discover “tens of thousands” of “empirical facts,” therefore we should be able to do precisely the same thing in Mesoamerica is pure fantasy, revealing absolutely no understanding the of the methodological realities and limitations imposed by lack of data.
4- Dude’s formulation of my argument is sheer nonsense. It does not merit a response. I will do so once, and then return the Dude to his proper position in “ignore mode.” His claims are in red below.
there are no written texts in Mesoamerica
--We are talking about Preclassic Mesoamerica (including the first century of the Classic).
--Writing in at least three different languages was known from Preclassic times: Olmec, Zapotec and Mayan. Writing “appear[s] first in the latest Olmec contexts, at about 500 to 400 BCE” (Oxford Encyclopedia of Mesoamerican Cultures, 3:339b) [Score one for the Book of Mormon.]
--Preclassic writing, however, is fragmentary, very limited in quantity, can only partially be read.
--Furthermore, the phonetics of proper names for ancient Mayan is generally unknown. City names are frequently written with “emblem glyphs.” Only “in a few cases [can] a main [emblem glyph] sign be read phonetically … Mayan words have been proposed as readings for some of these [personal names]; one example is Pacal (“shield”), a prominent ruler of Palenque. But in most cases modern researches have simply assigned to the individual rulers nicknames, typically from English or Mayan, that are suggested by the appearance of the glyphs.” (Sharer, The Ancient Maya, 5th ed. 141)
--The pronunciation of ancient Mayan is unknown, being a thousand years older than the earliest phonetic transcriptions of Mayan by the Spanish in the sixteenth century. Assuming ancient Mayan and modern Mayan are pronounced the same is like assuming that Old English and modern English are the same. There are, furthermore, “28 modern Mayan languages” (Sharer 582).
--It is likely that different Maya dialects were also spoken anciently with no single universal ancient pronunciation for the glyphs (Sharer, 589-90).
--What all of this means is that it is nearly impossible to know the ancient phonetic pronunciation of Classic Mayan personal and place names. Without that phonetic data, how are we to determine if a particular “emblem glyph” was pronounced “Zarahemla” by the Maya in ancient times? (The situation is actually more complex than this, but this should suffice to demonstrate the problem.)
there must have been written texts because the Book of Mormon says there were,
As noted above, there is evidence of Preclassic writing from at least the fifth century BC in three different cultural zones.
but they have all been destroyed
Dude apparently believes that it is unlikely that vast libraries of ancient texts can be destroyed. Perhaps he can show me the surviving texts from the hundreds of thousands of scrolls once housed in library of Alexandria, or the equally large library at Pergamum; as far as I am aware, not a single of the hundreds of thousands of scrolls once kept in these libraries survives. In fact, barring some papyri fragments found (uniquely) in Egypt, all surviving ancient Greek and Roman books exist largely in copies of copies of copies from the eighth century AD or later. (e.g. the earliest complete manuscript of Homer’s Illiad comes from the tenth century AD, nearly 2000 years after Homer. It survives only because Byzantine aristocrats valued Homer as literature and copied it, and because Byzantine scholars fleeing the Turks in the fourteenth century AD brought copies of it to Italy; the oldest copies survive in Renaissance libraries in Florence, Venice and Milan, not Greece.) Excluding writing on non-perishable materials (stone, metal, clay tablets, etc.) or preservation in special circumstances and ecological conditions (Egyptian tombs, DSS, Chinese scrolls at Dunhuang), the vast majority of ancient manuscripts no longer exist. The disappearance of texts is the norm in history, not the aberration. Survival of ancient books is aberrant. In the absence of cultural continuity facilitating copying and transmissions of manuscripts, most ancient texts are lost. (The Dude is also apparently unaware that the Book of Mormon says the Lamanites were systematically destroying Nephite records (Morm 6:6); sorry the text doesn’t support your theory.)
The scrolls all turned to rot.
There is no mention of writing on scrolls in the Book of Mormon.
The clay tablets were crushed to powder.
There is no mention of writing on clay tablets in the Book of Mormon.
stone engravings were systematically defaced.
Can Dude give any examples of the Nephites writing on stone? The classic example is a Jaredite stone engraving (Omni 1:20-21). Are there others? By the way, lengthy Olmec stone inscriptions are known (La Mojarra inscription). [Score one for the Book of Mormon.]
Nothing written has survived from those highly literate civilizations.
The Book of Mormon does not describe “highly literate civilizations.” Nearly all mention of writing in the Book of Mormon is associated with a particular scribal linage preserving their clan records. There are exceptions, mainly with elites exchanging epistles, also implying literacy was an elite phenomenon.
Is this Bill Hamblin's counter argument? (I ask humbly, without a trace of rude bluster, in the name of our long suffering MAD moderators, amen)
No, not in the slightest. It’s hard to tell if you are intentionally trying to distort the argument, or simply don’t have enough background to understand it. I’m happy to discuss the issue with you if you are prepared to engage the issues in a serious and informed manner, but you obviously aren’t.
we have not a single identifiable empirical fact that must have come into existence because of the reality of the Book of Mormon civilizations... in stark contrast to the situation in the Middle East.
The reason we can’t “identify” Nephite sites is because we lack sufficient texts giving the ancient pronunciation of proper names to allow us to do so. How can we possibly be expected to determine if a particular site is or is not Zarahemla if we do not know the ancient name of that site? It boggles the mind that Anti-Mormons are so thick-headed that they can’t seen this patently obvious fact.
If we had the same quantity and quality of data in Preclassic Mesoamerica that we do for the pre-Greek Near East, we would be able to decisively resolve the issue one way or another. But we don’t. The surviving evidence is what it is, and pretending that it is something more than it is should not be permitted as a substitute for proper historical method. The Book of Mormon does not fail this test. There is not enough data for the test to be undertaken. Constant rhetorical posturing by Anti-Mormons does not change the nature of the data or the methodological limitations imposed by that data. It is Mormon scholars who are careful and circumspect in their discussions of what the data can and cannot show us, in stark contrast to the endless inane unsubstantiated assertions by Anti-Mormons.
Indeed, Dude's arguments here are so systematically flawed as to the contents of the actual Book of Mormon text and working knowledge of the real conundrums associated with the interpretation of archaeological data and reconstruction of ancient history, that he's really lucky Hamblin condescends to debate him at all.
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