Dr. John E. Clark's presentation on archaeology and the Book of Mormon, the subject of a recent post here, has been taken to task by one of our critics for claiming that ancient civilization in Mesoamerica was not well known when the Book of Mormon came out. Clark stated that the Book of Mormon picture of advanced, literate civilizations in the ancient Americas was "laughable" when it was published. In more precise terms, LDS scholars have frequently pointed out that these things were not commonly known then. The claim is not that nobody knew about it, but that this was not common knowledge. This claim, according to one of our vocal anonymous critics, is "just ludicrous." In comments to my recent post, he explains:
This statement by John E. Clark, quoted by Jeff in his update, is just ludicrous:
The [Book of Mormon's] description of ancient peoples differs greatly from the notions of rude savages held by nineteenth-century Americans. The book's claim of city-societies was laughable at the time, but no one is laughing now.
That's idiotic. In the 1820s, everyone and their uncle knew the basic stories of Pizarro and the "city-society" of the Incas, and Cortez and the "city-society" of the Aztecs; they knew about pyramids and other ruins around Mexico City---they knew that Montezuma ruled over a great city---they knew about the big burial mounds studded with strangely worked artifacts in the northeast U.S., etc.
Everyone and his uncle knew this, we are told. But that's not evident in the reception such claims met in the early days of the Book of Mormon. The behavior of early Latter-day Saints and their critics strongly reinforces Dr. Clark's observation and reminds us of the dangers of hindsight in evaluating the Book of Mormon.
Our critic goes on to explain that pyramids, writing, civilization, building with cement, and so forth in ancient America were widely promulgated in an extremely popular work, Bernal Diaz del Castillo's Conquest of New Spain. So those claims in the Book of Mormon would have been obvious and easy for Joseph to concoct. Likewise, other critics called my attention to the works of German scholar Alexander von Humboldt who described scenes of ancient civilization in Mesoamerica long before the Book of Mormon came out. Joseph surely was aware of the abundant information about ancient civilization in the America's, they say. Nothing impressive in writing about that. Yawn.
So if everybody and their uncle knew about Bernal Diaz's Conquest of New Spain, I imagine we would find thousands of references to it in pre-1830 works. But a search on Google Books for pre-1830 works with the string "Conquest and New Spain" and either "Bernal" or "Diaz" yields only 5 or 6 works that appear to mention Diaz. A search for "Bernal Diaz" and "Conquest of Mexico" yields 8 works, including his own. Many more make mention of Bernal Diaz, of course. And yes, many publications had mentioned Cortez and Montezuma. But the issue is not so much what was on paper tucked in a library or university somewhere, but what was in the minds of Americans in 1830. In those early days, Diaz, von Humboldt, and Ethan Smith (who mentions and misquotes von Humboldt) were not cited as evidence for the obviousness or even plagiarism of the Book of Mormon, just as they were not cited by critics of the Book of Mormon. This all was a much later innovation of our critics.
If early Latter-day Saint leaders were con-men and knew of the works of von Humbold, Diaz, etc., then why not call attention to the corroborating evidence in these works? Why not arrange for a third-party to come back from a remote library with a new treasure of Book of Mormon evidence and proclaim that new data had been found in support? Oh, because everyone and their uncle already knew all about that and it would have been no help?
In fact, it appears that the Book of Mormon claims said to be so obvious today were the subject of great controversy in the early days. Latter-day Saints were under fire for those claims, and faith was required to accept them until wonderful, evidence-based relief came around 1840. This relief resulted in bold new defenses for the Book of Mormon and bold new claims of evidence -- at last! -- for the authenticity and plausibility of that Book. This evidence did not come from any of the sources Joseph has been said, with modern anti-Mormon hindsight, to have obviously and necessarily plagiarized. It did not come by pointing to the works of von Humbold, Bernal Diaz, or Ethan Smith, sources which could have been used to buttress Book of Mormon claims, if only Latter-day Saints known of those sources. The relief came in 1841 when John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood published Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan, an account of their travels in Central America that mentioned notable ruins they saw there. Was this already common knowledge? For the typical American, it was Stephens, not von Humboldt or others before 1830, who opened up the vision of Mesoamerica as a place where great ancient civilizations once existed. Stephens' biographer gave us an important insight into the impact of Stephens' work:
The acceptance of an "Indian civilization" demanded, to an American living in 1839 [when the first edition of Stephens appeared in England], an entire reorientation, for to him, an Indian was one of those barbaric, tepee dwellers against whom wars were constantly waged.... Nor did one ever think of calling the other [e.g., Mesoamerican] indigenous inhabitants of the continent "civilized." In the universally accepted opinion [of that day], they were like their North American counterparts -- savages." (Victor Wolfgang Von Hagen, Maya Explorer: The Life of John Lloyd Stephens, Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1948, p. 75, as cited by John L. Sorenson, "How Could Joseph Smith Write So Accurately about Ancient American Civilization?")
An 1848 editorial comment from the Church exults about the significance of Stephens' work and reminds us that this was news to the Mormons and to the world:
Stephens's late discoveries in Central America of Egyptian hieroglyphics, great numbers of which he has given in his drawings, and published in his able book of that curious region, and the still later discovery of many thousands of mummies in the caverns of Mexico, similar to those of Ancient Egypt, are evidences so pointed, that Ancient America must have been peopled from the highly civilized nations of Asia, that the learned are at last convinced of the fact. The unlearned, however, have got the start of the learned in this instance, for they found it out about nineteen years ago through the medium of the Book of Mormon. The Latter-Day Saints Millennial Star. Volume X, p. 343.
After Stephens' book became well known and as educated people became more aware of the extensive civilization of ancient Mesoamerica, there was still little recognition outside the Church that such findings might shed favorable light on the Book of Mormon. Critics still condemned it as utterly implausible. An intriguing exception in the reaction of journalists outside the Church to the Book of Mormon comes from The New Yorker, edited by Horace Greeley. On Dec. 12, 1840, there was an article in which a writer under the name of Josephine, believed to be the daughter of General Charles Sanford, a New York lawyer and military figure (according to Donald Q. Cannon, "In the Press: Early Newspaper Reports on the Initial Publication of the Book of Mormon," Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, Vol. 16, No. 1, 2007, pp. 4-15, see footnote 51). This was later reprinted in the Iowa Territorial Gazette, Feb. 3, 1841. After a fair-minded description of the Book of Mormon, Josephine refers to recent discoveries about Mesoamerica, apparently referencing the work of Stephens:
If on comparison it appears that these characters are similar to those recently discovered on those ruins in Central America, which have attracted so much attention lately, and which are decidedly of Egyptian architecture, it will make a very strong point for Smith. It will tend to prove that the plates are genuine, even if it does not establish the truth of his inspiration, or the fidelity of his translation. . . .
Josephine and The New Yorker do not seem to be aware that knowledge of ancient hieroglyphic-like writing in ancient Mesoamerican civilizations was common knowledge before publication of the Book of Mormon, and seem to view the knowledge brought by Stephens' works as something that is novel.
Matthew Roper describes how Stephens' book was received ("John Bernhisel’s Gift to a Prophet: Incidents of Travel in Central America and the Book of Mormon," Interpreter, 2016):
It was widely praised in the American press for their interesting description of pre-Columbian ruins and their excellent illustrations, which pointed to a level of civilization in the region previously unanticipated by most Americans. The two men returned to northern Yucatan in 1841 for a second expedition, described in another publication, Incidents of Travels in Yucatan, published in 1843.7 In 1844, Catherwood published his own work, Views of Ancient Monuments in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan, which included twenty-five hand-colored lithographs interspersed with his commentary.8
The books were enthusiastically received by American readers, including Latter-day Saints. Even before they were able to read the book, missionaries were citing reports of the travelers’ lectures in New York City as evidence for and to refute criticism of the Book of Mormon. Parley P. Pratt reprinted one report from the New York Express in the September 1840 Millennial Star. The article reported Stephens and Catherwood’s descriptions of numerous statues, monuments and obelisks “wholly covered with hieroglyphics and inscriptions” at the sites of Quirigua and Palenque.9 In November, 1840 Erastus Snow chided an anonymous critic who had insisted that there was no evidence of pre Columbian writing: “Here is a specimen of your consummate ignorance of American Antiquities. … Nearly all the principal papers of this country have of late published the results of the researches of Messrs. Stephens and Catherwood, in Central America. On the river Montagua, Monuments and Statues in abundance were found, many of which are covered with writings, and yet you say these are no proofs that the science of writing was ever known here. The system of Logic by which you arrive at your conclusion must be peculiar to yourself.”10 The June 15, 1841, issue of the Times and Seasons reprinted another article from the New York Weekly Herald reporting the substance of the travelers’ lectures. The Nauvoo editor who introduced the article thought the report “proved beyond controversy that, on this vast continent, once flourished a mighty people, skilled in the arts and sciences.”11
In a letter to Joseph Smith in September 1841, John E. Page explained a “new course of argument” that he had adopted and found useful:
I have great access to the people in a new course of argument which I have adopted and that is this — I have lately availed myself of the purchase of Stevens [Stephens] and Catherwoods travels in Guatemala or central America in which those gentlemen have exhibited by seventy plates the antiquities of that count[r]y which when compared with The Book of Mormon so completely proves the truth and divinity of the Book of Mormon there is not a gentile dog left to stir a tongue in an attempt to put down the collateral testimony which those records afford me in proof of the Book of Mormon — Next or second argument is the fulfilment of the Prophetical sayings which are in the Book of Mormon itself.12
The response of Joseph Smith and others in the Church shows that the early Mormon leaders were anxious to point to evidence in support of Book of Mormon claims. This 1841 book looks like their first big break. The Church then began publishing a series of articles talking about the great support they now had from this important work. Evidence mattered. It was wanted. It was boldly discussed.
If Joseph had known of a map that could support the plausibility of Lehi's trail, surely that would have been discussed as soon as possible. No need to suffer criticism and persecution for a decade when a high-end European map could be found somewhere with a treasure like "Nehem" on it. Ditto for books about ancient civilization, temples, etc. Of they had been part of Mormon knowledge, they would have been touted. If they had been part of common knowledge, the popular attacks on the Book of Mormon would have been of a much different flavor. As John Clark said, the broad ideas of ancient writing and civilization in the ancient Americas were laughable -- not to everyone, of course, but to the real people that the Saints interacted with and who loudly mocked the Book of Mormon.
Information about the novelty of Stephens' publications comes from scholarship around Stephens' own experience. Stephens was a lawyer who, prior to pursuing his law studies, had four years of education at Columbia College in New York City. Through his successful publications about his travels in the late 1830s, he was among a handful of elites who had traveled the world and had a personal network including scholars of Europe and North America. In a biography of Stephens, Peter Harris, "Cities of Stone: Stephens & Catherwood in Yucatan, 1839-1842 -- Co-Incidents of Travel in Yucatan," Photoarts Journal (Summer 2006), http://www.photoarts.com/harris/z.html (initial page), we read the following in the introduction:
In 1839 a young American lawyer, fresh from his astonishingly successful publication of two books of travel, secured an appointment as charge d'affaires to the Republic of Central America. His official task was to locate the seat of government of that civil-war-torn country (then a confederation of states that are today the independent countries of Central America) and conclude a trade agreement with it. His real reason for this journey, however, was to explore the jungles of Central America and the Yucatan Peninsula for the remnants of a once-great civilization whose existence was only hinted at in the literature of the period.
In 1841 John Lloyd Stephens published Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan, bringing to the world for the first time a reliable account of the Xculoc, Palace of the Figurespre-Columbian ruins of the Yucatan Peninsula and northern Central America, ruins of a civilization we know today as the Maya. The existence of the fabulous cities of Palenque, Copan, and Uxmal was finally, unequivocally confirmed. The romantic image of ancient stone cities mouldering beneath the thick tropical rain-forest captivated the public's imagination, and the two volumes, illustrated with Frederick Catherwood's phenomenally accurate engravings, caused a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic. Scarcely three months after the publication of Central America Stephens and Catherwood organized a second trip to Yucatan to continue their explorations, which had been cut short at Uxmal by Catherwood's illness. The results of this expedition were published in 1843 as Incidents of Travel in Yucatan.
These books were the first accurate and reliable descriptions of the Maya ruins of southern Mexico and northern Central America to be published. (emphasis mine)
But with all of his connections and access to information, how much about Mesoamerica had been obvious and well known to him for years prior to his travels there? Was he just rehashing and publicizing what was already well known? On page 4 of Harris (http://www.photoarts.com/harris/0025.html), we read the following:
Exactly when and where Stephens' interest became piqued by the antiquities of Yucatan and Central America is uncertain. While he was in London he may have heard of the reports of Juan Galindo, the English-born governor of the state of Peten, Guatemala, whose notices concerning the ruins of Palenque and Copan were published in London and Paris between 1831 and 1836. Earlier, an edited version of Antonio del Rio's report to the governor of Guatemala had appeared in London in 1822, with illustrations by Frederick Waldeck. In its appendix, entitled Teatro Critico Americano, one Dr. Pablo Felix Cabrera, of Guatemala, purports to prove that the ruins are Egyptian in origin. In 1834, the two volume Antiquites Americaines had been published in Paris, which also attempted to show that the ancient monuments of the New World were not indigenous, but rather the products of the civilizations of Egypt and India. The European ethnocentricity that dismissed the inhabitants of the Americas as "men just emerging from barbarity" insisted that if there had been an "advanced" civilization in the New World, it had been brought over by the Egyptians, the "Hindoos," the lost tribes of Israel, or survivors from Atlantis.
In 1838 Jean Frederick Comte de Waldeck published Voyage Pittoresque et Archaeologique dans le Province d'Yucatan. At the age of 68 Waldeck, under the sponsorship of the Mexican government, had spent two years living in the ruins at Palenque, where he took a teenage Maya bride. He returned to Paris in 1838 to publish Voyage Pittoresque, his first work. Waldeck's magnum opus was not published until 1866 (he lived to be 106 years old) and he is today dismissed as an eccentric whose "ideas are so absurd as to preclude any intelligent discussion of them." Although F. L. Hawks (whom Stephens had met in London) and John Russell Bartlett each claim to have called his attention to the reports of ruined stone cities in Yucatan and Central America, their conflicting accounts agree that it was this 1838 work, with 22 of Waldeck's inaccurate and romanticized drawings of Maya sculpture and architecture, that was the final spur to Stephens.
John Russell Bartlett, a New York merchant, bookseller, and ardent "antiquarian," was later librarian for John Carter Brown's collection of books on the Americas and chief of the U.S.-Mexican Border Comission of 1854. He was a founder, in 1842, of the American Antiquarian Society (Stephens and Catherwood were charter members) and was active in the circle of American intellectuals who were the forerunners of the anthropologists and ethnologists of today. In an autobiographical memoir prepared for his family Bartlett wrote, "...I claim to have first suggested these [explorations in Central America and Yucatan] to Mr. S."
Hawks, too, in his obituary of Stephens in Putnam's Monthly Magazine, claimed, "In repeated conversations with the present writer, the attention of Mr. Stephens was called to the ruins of Guatemala and Yucatan, as represented in the works of Del Rio and Waldeck." From the accounts of Hawks and Bartlett and the date of publication of Waldeck's Voyage Pittoresque (1838) we may assume that Stephens' plan to explore the ruins did not crystallize until the latter half of 1838 or the early part of 1839.
"Fortunately for him," Bartlett continues, "Mr. Frederick Catherwood, a distinguished architect and draughtsman who had spent much time in Egypt and the Holy Land, and with whom he was on intimate terms, was then in New York. Mr. Catherwood had great enthusiasm in every thing (sic) appertaining to architecture, and was an ardent lover of the picturesque, and of archaeological research. Mr. Stephens made him a favorable offer to accompany him to Central America, which offer he at once accepted."
The existence of advanced ancient civilizations in the Americas with great cities worthy of exploration did not seem to be well known to Stephens until long after the Book of Mormon was published. Can we expect those on the frontier without the benefits of advanced education and world travel to have fared better?
Added insight into the state of knowledge prior to Stephens' popular book comes from an 1841 review of Stephens' work found in The North American Review, Vol. 53, 1841, published by James Monroe and Company, Boston, available online through the Making of America section of the Cornell University Library.
The review begins on page 479 of the publication. Near the beginning of the review, on page 480, we have this comment regarding the ancient Mesoamericans and "the riddle of their history":
The recent discoveries in Central America have attracted a new attention to these questions. The time for constructing a theory is not yet. The materials are still too scanty. But they are accumulating in great richness; and to no part of the world does the historical inquirer look with a more intense interest, than to that country, lately as little thought of as if it did not exist, now known to be so fruitful in marvels.
Now look at page 489:
It would be all but incredible, if it were not now shown to be certainly true, that in the wilds of Central America are found vast architectural piles, with complicated decorations chiseled in hard stone, which, different as is their style, might without extravagance be called worthy of the best eras of European art. The "vast buildings or terraces, and pyramidal structures, grand and in good preservation, richly ornamented," struck Mr. Stephens on his first approach, as "in picturesque effect almost equal to the ruins of Thebes."
Stephens is quoted on page 490 as he describes the experience of looking out over one of the ancient cities:
There is no rudeness or barbarity in the design or proportions; on the contrary, the whole wears an air of architectural symmetry and grandeur; and as the stranger ascends the steps and casts a bewildered eye along its open and desolate doors, it is hard to believe that he sees before him the work of a race in whose epitaph, as written by historians, they are called ignorant of art, and said to have perished in the rudeness of savage life.
Stephens is challenging the day's common knowledge of Native Americans, showing that the architectural evidence points to an ancient people who were not rude savages or barbarians.
Also see page 491 and page 492, where we read an amusing illustration of the ignorance of the day. The reviewer quotes a passage from a competitor's journal that argues for the ignorance of learned men and the British public by pointing out how some allegedly new discoveries were previously documented by others (". . . we can adduce an extraordinary instance of the ignorance prevailing among literary and scientific men in general, of the immense sources of information from which they have been excluded by the voluminous pedantry employed upon the subject. . . . This circumstance is alone sufficient to show that the subject is, unlike Egyptian antiquities, comparatively new to the reading British public."), but the reviewer then points out that this is in fact a serious error and that Stephens' report of Copan appears to be the first - all of which only strengthens the case for the lack of widespread knowledge about Mesoamerica in that era, even among the learned.
As for the works of von Humboldt and their role in early LDS circles, nearby libraries available to Joseph Smith did not carry his works in time to be of any help to him. Regarding other LDS people and their use of or non-use of von Humboldt's works, Henry Stebbins of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in a footnote added to a Feb. 1894 lecture in Independence, Missouri (available online at http://sidneyrigdon.com/1901Stb1.htm), said:
Some years after giving these lectures I learned that a brief synopsis of Humboldt's works was translated into English and published in London by a lady named Helen Maria Williams, and in seeking among encyclopedias and antiquarian books for proofs I found mention of it on page 265 of Priest's work, 1835 edition, which mention I had not seen before, not having read the book beyond the deluge traditions. But no date was given of its issue, and all search for it proved unavailing. And among all the authors only one or two even mentioned her work. At most it only proved that it was published by or before 1835 (or 1833), while the Book of Mormon was copyrighted in 1829. However, in 1898 Elder Heman C. Smith found a copy of her work in England and brought it to Lamoni, for the Church Library. The date of its publication is not given on its title-page; but on page 33 is given date of 1813 in Paris, which probably means something relating to its issuing in French, for the English issue was from London, whatever may have been the year. After a personal search of twenty-five years in city book-stores for antique works, this is the first copy I have seen. Other elders in the church have likewise searched, but have given no account of this work, which shows how very little it could have been known in America during these seventy years. There is no probability that it was known to Joseph Smith, or to other supposed authors of the Book of Mormon.
I dug into the von Humboldt issue in more detail a few years ago and published my findings as "Alexander von Humboldt and the Book of Mormon: What Could Joseph Smith Have Gleaned?" at JeffLindsay.com. The idea that Joseph or his vast team of imagined technical advisors drew upon von Humboldt's works is simply implausible.
Everyone and his uncle today knows about ancient civilizations in the Americas. But projecting that situation into an assessment of common knowledge in 1830 results in an over-confident blunder that is belied by the words and actions of early Mormons and their critics, as well as John Lloyd Stephens himself. Yes, some people knew, but in general, what Dr. Clark said is fair. The Book of Mormon came under fire in its first decade or so for its description of literate ancient civilizations in the New World. And like so many other early "problems" with that text, what was once a weakness has become a strength.
Related resources:
"What Could Joseph Smith Have Known about Mesoamerica?" by J. Lindsay
"Joseph Smith, John Lloyd Stephens, and the Times and Seasons" by David C. Handy
"'War of Words and Tumult of Opinions': The Battle for Joseph Smith’s Words in Book of Mormon Geography" by Neal Rappleye (Interpreter, 2014)