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Book of Mormon/Warfare/Weapons/Cimeters
< Book of Mormon | Warfare | Weapons
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Contents
Book of Mormon anachronisms: Cimeters/Scimeters
Questions
The Book of Mormon mentions "chariots," which one assumes to be a wheeled vehicle. It is also claimed that no draft animals existed in the New World to pull such chariots.
To see citations to the critical sources for these claims, click here
Detailed Analysis
One author wrote:
Mesoamerican Scimitar-Like Weapons
A number of candidate forms are known that plausibly fit the Book of Mormon category cimeter. One category consists of simple agricultural or hunting devices that could also have served in battle. Others were more obviously weapons from the outset.
Wood implements. Today's steel-bladed machete is the functional equivalent of a certain agricultural tool from pre-Columbian times.43 Hayden has suggested that in highland Guatemala, "A sharp-bladed, heavy piece of hardwood may have been employed [anciently] for cutting down or ringing scrub and secondary growth, which is today cleared with a machete. People in that region before World War II, when metal implements were scarce and expensive, used tools called palo machetes ("wooden machetes") to clear scrub growth from fields. These were made of hardwoods like madron".44 Clemency C. Coggins, a specialist in the Maya civilization, believes the modern machete "to be a direct descendant of the wooden sickle-like tools found [preserved] in the Cenote" or well at Chichen Itza.45 Hayden observes that "such a tool might also serve for defense against predators, snakes, and strangers while in the field"; consequently, "the agricultural tool and the weapon may have been one item."46
Sometime around 200 BC, Zeniff recorded that his people were attacked by the Lamanites while they were "feeding their flocks, and tilling their lands" (Mosiah 9:14). When the survivors fled to the king, he had to arm them quickly. Thus "I did arm them with bows, and with arrows, with swords, and with cimeters, and with clubs, and with slings, and with all manner of weapons which we could invent" (Mosiah 9:16). Nothing is said of what materials were used to make these arms, but given the emergency situation it is plausible that they used or based them upon tools that they already employed for everyday purposes, such as wooden implements for clearing vegetation and slings and the bow and arrow for hunting. Since the Lamanites were without armor at this time, even such relatively crude weapons could have been effective.
A curved wood weapon with inset stone blades. While the Book of Mormon cimeter may have been a curved wooden blade, the Nephite and Lamanite use of armor, starting in the battles of the first century BC, could have brought about a need for more effective blades. In a recent study of Mesoamerican warfare, Hassig describes a curved, clublike weapon that he labels a "short-sword."47 He knows of their presence only from the post-Classic codices (after AD 1,000).48 This device consisted of a curved piece of hardwood approximately 18 inches long with obsidian blades inset into its cutting end. Hassig credits this slashing weapon with a number of characteristics that clubs, for example, could not provide.49
Such a weapon may have survived right up to the Spanish conquest in highland Guatemala. One Spanish account of a native tradition relates that "the weapons with which it is said they fought were bows and arrows and certain cutlasses that they say were made of flint."50 The curved form of the end of the "short-sword" could justify the term cutlasses.
Despite Hassig's belief in the late invention of this weapon in Mesoamerican history, evidence from earlier Mesoamerican art shows that it was known far earlier than he realized. A stela from Comitan, Chiapas, from before AD 1,000, portrays a curved object like this weapon, while something similar is depicted on a monument at Chichen Itza, dated, according to its inscription, to AD 874.51 Moreover, murals from Teotihuacan as early as AD 450 display curved-bladed knives that look very similar to short-swords.52 Hassig grants that these "were doubtless used in combat as auxiliary weapons. . . . All combatants [among the Teotihuacanos] may have carried them."53 By their curved shape they too could be called cimeters.
Even back in the era of the Book of Mormon, a weapon was pictured that is similar to the short sword. Hayden notes that a "hooked implement" depicted on Stelas 3 and 4 at Izapa (second century BC) and on Stela 2 at La Venta (no later than the sixth century BC) "bears a remarkable resemblance to the hooked machete used by some groups today." To him "it seems most probable that the item was being used as a weapon," which must have been made of wood since no archaeological remains of this form have been recovered.54 Another early Guatemalan site, now known as Abaj Takalik, contains carved stone monuments somewhat similar to the sculptural styles at Izapa and La Venta and seemingly dated to the centuries before 400 BC One of these pictures a man who grasps a weapon with a curved blade. It is impossible to tell from these sculptured images whether the blades were of wood alone or had an inset obsidian edge.
Other curved weapons. The possibility has been suggested that a strange double-curved weapon held in the left hand of the warrior figure on the Loltún cave relief (see p. 34) might be considered a scimitar/cimeter.55 Its two blades curve in opposite directions from the ends of a central handle. Grube and Schele consider the object to be a weapon, and it looks something like a special version of the short-sword discussed above. We recall that the date for the figure at Loltún falls within the Book of Mormon period. Moreover, the Izapan art style in which the figure is carved originated in Pacific coastal Guatemala or southern Mexico. That region includes the territory thought by most Latter-day Saint researchers to have been the Nephite and Lamanite heartland. Thus the weapon shown at Loltún has a good chance of being one of the arms that Lamanites and Nephites were using during the central segment of Book of Mormon history. In fact, at Kaminaljuyu, the great ruined city in the valley of Guatemala, which many consider to have been the city of Nephi (or Lehi-Nephi), Stela 11 shows a warrior figure holding a curved object similar to that on the Loltún portrait. It may be even earlier than the one at Loltún, dating to the early Miraflores period (250 to 100 BC). Some Mesoamerican experts consider that the curved object on Stela 11 was the equivalent of the double-bladed weapon at Loltún.56[1]
Notes
- ↑ References are available in the original article.