Stone Box

Parent page: Book of Mormon/Anthropology

Persian writing on metal plates

Exactly so "Darius the Median," who was to liberate the Jews of Lehi's own generation, since a public proclamation of his written on stone could not be seen by all the people, had copies of it made and circulated on papyrus throughout the empire, and some of these have actually turned up in the Jewish colony at Elephantine, where the Jews of Lehi's day fled when Jerusalem fell.15 The same ruler had his royal proclamation put on plates of pure gold and silver and buried in a carefully made stone box, which was discovered in 1938.^[1]

Notes

1. ↑ Hugh W. Nibley, An Approach to the Book of Mormon, 3rd edition, (Vol. 6 of the Collected Works of Hugh Nibley), edited by John W. Welch, (Salt Lake City, Utah : Deseret Book Company ; Provo, Utah : Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, 1988), Chapter 2, citing An excellent photograph of these plates and their box is given in the frontispiece of Sidney B. Sperry, Ancient Records Testify in Papyrus and Stone (Salt Lake City: General Boards of M.I.A. of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1938). For a general survey of writing on plates in antiquity and a reprinting of the same photograph, see Franklin S. Harris, The Book of Mormon, Messages and Evidences (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1953), 95—105, photograph is on p. 4..