The Book of Mormon tells the story of a family who left Mesopotamia at the time of the confounding of languages at the tower of Babel. This family built peculiar barges and were carried across the ocean by the power of God. Because these barges were built to sustain submarine like travel they had no windows and tightly sealed doors on either side to let air in when surfaced. When asked how they would see in the boats, the Lord commanded the leader of this group to come up with something. He asked the Lord to make white stones that he had gathered glow. Some believe that he got this idea from Noah's ark.Noah had a fog light? What?
John A. Tvetdnes writes on this subject, and if you care to understand here is the link.
http://farms.byu.edu/display.php?table=jbms&id=148
The Book of Mormon is the history of a small group of people, of a lineage of kings and prophets. It was handed down father to son style for hundreds of years as it was being composed. The stories in the BoM are not meant to be a complete history, but it very obvious that the background for these stories is a culture and a civilization very complex both socially and politically. It tells details of battles and wars, of miracles and prophecies. It describes sprawling cities, and impressive achievements.Are you telling me that the Spanish didn't report on the civilizations that they conquered...or that such reports, if they did exist weren't available?...Please provide some reference for your claim that the existence of cities was such a radical idea.
Many of these achievements were thougt to have been impossible for "savages" by New England Americans. The BoM was published in 1829, when scarcely little was known about ancient-american culture. John L. Sorenson of FARMS wrote about this, and wrote about many of the details about ancient Meso-American culture we find in the BoM that were not and could not have been known by Joseph Smith or anyone else at the time in the same book mentioned above.
In 1839, 10 years after the BoM was published John Lloyd Stephens published a book about his travels and discoveries in central america, "Incidents and of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucutan". When learning about the things that Stephens wrote about, Smith was surprised that there had once been a spectacular ancient civilization in Central America, and that at least in superficial terms it agreed with the cultural patterns revealed in the BoM.
Orson Pratt, one of the better educated early LDS said, "Noone will dispute the fact that the existence of antique remains in different parts of America was known long before Mr. Smith was born. But...most of the discoveries made by Catherwood and Stephens were original-that most of the forty-four cities described by [Stephen's book] had not been described by previous travelers."
Stephen's biographer Victor W. Von Hagen wrote n 1947 in his book "Maya Explorer" John Lloyd Stephens and the Lost Cities of Central America and Yucatan" :
"The acceptance of an 'Indian civilization' demanded, to an American living in 1839, an entire reorientation, for to him, and Indian was one of those barbaric, tepee dwellers against whom wars were constantly waged...Nor did one ever think of calling the other indigenous inhabitants of the continent 'civilized'. In the universally accepted opinion [of that day], they were like the North Marican counterparts-"savages".
It is clear that very little was known about the ancient americans in Joseph Smith's day. The list of things he got right in the BoM that were discovered to be true only later is far too great to discuss here. I leave you with a link to a place where only some of those evidences are discussed:
http://www.jefflindsay.com/BMEvidences.shtml
Sargon
