by David Stewart

Overview

The original inhabitants of North America arrived near what is now Los Angeles in eight barges in approximately 1676 BC.  They lived almost exclusively in North America for exactly thirty-two generations, after which time they annihilated themselves, all but two men, in a civil war, in about 600 B.C.  The history of the Jaredites is described in the Book of Ether, and in other records of the Jaredite civilization that will be translated as time permits.  The Jaredite history is of particular importance as it serves as a warning to all people.  Mormon recorded:

“it is expedient that all people should know the things which are written in this account” (Mosiah 28:11).

Ethnic Origins

Carlos de Siguenza y Gongorra [1645-1700] must have had access to the Aztec records or traditions, because he “arrived at the curiously definite result that the [original settlers of Mexico] were descended from Naphtuhim, son of Mizraim and grandson of Noah, who left Egypt for Mexico shortly after the confusion of tongues.”[1]  This was recorded by Siguenza after he had read the Aztec records, which the zealot Catholic padres later burned because they spoke of a Christianity which was not known to Rome and was therefore branded as heretical.

Naphtuhim is the plural form of “nephet” which means honeycomb.  It means the honeycomb people, or in other words, the beekeepers, or the people of Deseret (Ether 2:3). I discovered this in 1967.

Externally, this was a monolithic race. They were all descended from Ham.  Internally, they were an agglomeration of Egyptian, Hittite, Phoenician, Libyan, and other Hamitic tribes. But they were primarily the Naphtuhim, or honey raisers. 

Josephus calls the Naphtuhim the Nedim. He admits that nothing is known of these people except for the name, as their Old World cities were overthrown in the Ethiopic War during the time of Moses.[2]

We should note here that all legitimate Jaredite kings were descended from the first pharaoh of Egypt, called Menes by the historian Manetho and AHA in the hieroglyphs. Menes is the Greek translation of Aha.  Aha or Ahah is also the name of a Jaredite king (Ether 11:10-11).

These people were from North Africa. As seen on Olmec statues, they had broad, flat, Negroid noses, thick lips, and eyes closer to the horizontal with an epicanthic fold of the upper eyelid like many modern East Asians.

Linguistic Affinities

Jaredite names provided in the Book of Mormon provide evidence of descent from Ham:

- At least two Jaredites are named Heth (Ether 1:16, 25-26).  Heth, son of Canaan and grandson of Ham, is the name of the ancestor of the Hittites. The Hebrew word for Hittite means “children of Heth.”

- The Jaredite Ahah (Ether 1:9-10, Ether 11:10-11) carries the same name as the first pharaoh of Egypt, the grandson of Ham, as listed by the Egyptian historian Manetho.

- The name Ether is a very old Egyptian place name.  When applied to a person, it means “prisoner.”[3]  Ether was born in prison, his father Coriantor having spent his entire life in prison (Ether 11:23).

- The “Obviously Hebrew” Jaredite names Aaron, Levi, Jared and Seth were in fact among the many names the Israelites borrowed from Egypt when they left, like the name Moses, which is also Egyptian and not at all Hebrew.  Jared is a name that existed before there were any Israelites, as is Seth.

Vocational Affinities

Certain nations of the ancient world excelled in specialized professions.  Who were the Old World experts in professions practiced by the Jaredites with great expertise?

Shipbuilding (Ether 2:16-17).  The experts in shipbuilding were the Phoenicians and, to a lesser extent, the Egyptians.  The Egyptians were descended from Mizraim, son of Ham (Genesis 10:6).  Cities were traditionally named after their founder, who later became the god of the city.  The capital of Phoenicia is Sidon, founded by Sidon, oldest son of Canaan and grandson of Ham (Genesis 10:15).

Glassmaking (Ether 3:1,3).  The Phoenicians were also the ancient world’s experts in glassmaking.

Iron working and metallurgy.  The Jaredite expertise in metallurgy is repeatedly noted.  Moroni observed:

“And they did work in all manner of ore, and they did make gold, and silver, and iron, and brass, and all manner of metals; and they did dig it out of the earth; wherefore they did cast up mighty heaps of earth to get ore, of gold, and of silver, and of iron, and of copper. And they did work all manner of fine work” (Ether 10:23).

The Jaredite king Shule, either independently or with a few followers, was able to smelt steel for swords from the hill Ephraim – a tremendous accomplishment for an individual or group without a large organizational infrastructure (Ether 7:9).

The metallurgy experts of the ancient world were the Hittites, descendants of Heth, son of Canaan and grandson of Ham (Genesis 10:15). 

Bee keeping (Ether 2:3).  The bee was especially significant to the Egyptians and to the Ethiopians in their national value systems. When the Ethiopians were vassals to the Egyptians, they would even pay their tribute with honey.

What do all of these nations (Egypt, Phoenicia, the Hittites, and Ethiopia) have in common?  They are all nations descended from Ham.  Ironworking and glassworking expertise actually go further back to Tubal Cain, “an instructor of every artificer in glass and iron” (Genesis 4:22).  Hebrew tradition as recorded in the Genesis Rabba midrash and the eleventh century Jewish commentator Rashi  maintains that Naamah, sister of Tubal-cain (Genesis 4:22), was taken by Noah as a second wife to preserve Cain’s posterity, and that she became the mother of Ham.[4]  The transmission of metallurgical knowledge within the family follows ancient custom. The specialized expertise cited among the Jaredites further corroborates linguistic and historical evidence that the Jaredites were descendants of Ham.

Language

There has been much erroneous speculation about Jaredite language by individuals who have either missed or ignored basic scriptural statements.  The children of Adam and Eve were taught to read and write a language which was “pure and undefiled” (Moses 6:6).  Until the tower of Babel, “the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech” (Genesis 11:1).  At the time of confusion of tongues at the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:9), the language of the Jaredites was not confounded (Ether 1:33-37).  The Jaredites therefore spoke the original language, or language of Adam.

The history of the Jaredites was recorded on twenty-four gold plates (Mosiah 8:9).  Moroni abridged this record into the Book of Ether, acknowledging that he had not written the “hundredth part” (Ether 15:33).  The expression “hundredth part” occurs only seven times in the thousands of pages of Holy Writ. Nowhere does it appear to be an exaggeration or a mindless expression.  The Book of Ether, representing less than 1% of the 24 gold plates of Limhi, in English translation runs 31 pages in the current edition of the Book of Mormon.  Even allowing for the comments of Moroni, we get the idea that about three thousand pages of English text can be translated from the twenty-four gold plates of Limhi.  The language of Adam is extremely compact, over one hundred times more so than any language on earth today. Each character must have many meanings, an average of about twenty meanings each, or expand to about twenty English words.

Unlike the rest of the world, these Jaredites retained the language of Adam throughout their entire history until their civilization was destroyed in approximately 600 BC.  This language used multiple writing systems simultaneously, even in the same document. Their four primary writing systems were Egyptian hieroglyphic, Phoenician, hieratic, and cuneiform.  All other languages were derived from and are subsets of the original language, which circumscribed them all.  Jaredite inscriptions occasionally carry characters that we recognize in Etruscan, Chinese, and other early writing systems (examples of numerous finds from a variety of independent sources will be demonstrated in other articles), which can be shown to be used correctly – something no forger could have known how to do.  Scholars have no knowledge of this and no framework for understanding such finds, and so it is not surprising that their knee-jerk response to the thousands of artifacts found in North America incorporating elements of Old World writing systems – often combined in the same artifact – has been to vociferously denounce them as frauds, frequently without ever actually examining the artifacts.

The African Mende script of Sierra Leone contains many of the characters found in the Burrows Cave tablets, the Kinderhook Plates, and the Michigan Tablets. It is not a good assumption to suppose they are used in the same way. I spent a lot of time trying to find useful matches, but without result. All we can say is that a lot of North African writing systems apparently descended from the Jaredite scripts.

Founding Fathers

Some time ago a reader, asked me to translate the name of Jared’s brother, Mahonri Moriancumer.  Both of these names are in the language of Adam, which is very difficult to translate.

Mahonri is written in hieroglyphics as gAJJK!. It means a watchman on a watch tower, or the watchtower itself. (Please access the PDF version of this page if the hieroglyphic fonts are not displaying properly.)

Moriancumer is written: QKBe<, MORI, an ancient name of Egypt; AJ, AN, removed; SQIAQ{Ko, CUMER, the Great Creator.

gAJJK!QKBe<AJSQIAQ{Ko, MAHONRI MORI-AN-CUMER, the watchtower removed from Egypt by the Great Creator.

“Brother of Jared” is written =$X. That first character is the closest match; the exact character I can not find in my 20+ hieroglyphic fonts.

Is there any question in your mind as to why the scribe chose the latter expression instead of the former?

The translations and transcriptions must be considered tentative until they are actually found in ancient texts and then they must be adjusted accordingly. Mahonri I found and it is exact. I also found the spelling of Jared, $X, written on an ivory palette in Central America. You would expect it to be written JA-RED, but it is written JAR-ED.

Technology

At the peak of the Jaredite civilization, there was no greater nation on earth (Ether 1:43).  During this entire period, they were more technologically advanced than any other nation on the earth. They were experts in metallurgy, chemistry, glassmaking, etc.

These people had a much higher technology than any other nation on the earth throughout their entire existence. They were experts in all forms of metallurgy. They were much better at making fine steel than the Saracens, from whom the Western World obtained its knowledge of fine cutlery steel based in centers such as Solingen, Germany, from specialists brought back by the Crusaders in 1300 A.D.

There was no documented cultural exchange with one brief exception. There was no technology transfer except for imparting the knowledge of rubber making to the third permanent body of settlers, but the art of vulcanizing rubber was lost at some point such that the fourth and last permanent settlement group had to recover this lost art by pure trial and error (Charles Goodyear).

Religion

These people had prophets and seers who saw the past and the future with eyewitness detail and recorded it. Yet they did not hold any priesthood.  These people did not practice human sacrifice.

Chronology

This group came after the shortening of human lifespan to 120 years (later again to 72 years at about 1000 B.C.).  Since they lived here for exactly thirty-two generations, we can create a rough timetable for each generation, as follows. The average intergenerational time from father to son is 38 years.  The date marks the approximate birth time frame of each individual.