Something as valuable as gold… A major trade item for millennia, in fact
How DO you deal with a corpse when it’s sweltering?
The short answer, used by our poorer ancestors, was to bury Grandpa. Quickly.
Hasidic Law and Islamic Sharia both still mandate burial within 24 hours of death. For our somewhat wealthier ancestors, the answer was to use deodorant on Grandpa – and then bury him when more convenient. For our really wealthy ancestors, it was to use deodorant, remove and can the internal organs, paint what’s left with pitch, let Grandpa dry out, and build a huge mausoleum around him… a pyramid would be even better (it’s slightly harder for thieves to break into).
The preferred pre-burial deodorant du jour from well before 600 BC until the Middle Ages is golden brown in color. It’s still used in Catholic and Orthodox Christian funerals in fragrant-smoke-distribution devices called censers. These are generally brass containers dangled from a chain, with a piece of charcoal in the bottom and a crystal or two of the aromatic spice on top of the burning coal. This golden crystalline stuff is found as sap leaking out of knife-slashes in the bark of an unassuming bush found mainly in the Omani mountains. It’s called frankincense. It is wonderfully fragrant. A tiny nugget of frankincense, with some raisins and cashews, will do wonders for a huge bowl of basmati rice.
A careful reading of 1 Nephi 1 through 1 Nephi 17 in the Book of Mormon comes across to a modern archeologist or geographer as a startlingly accurate description of the Frankincense Trail – the biggest trade route of antiquity, predating the Asiatic Silk Road. Scholars in the 1990’s found a small tribe on the northwestern Yemeni coast whose name is, using the standard three consonants for an Arabic word: ݦ ﮭ ﮞ . In reverse (western) character order, this is NHM. This could be pronounced ‘naheem” “nuhom”, “niham” – or Nahom, depending on where the diacritical marks are added, something first introduced in the 9th to 11th centuries AD, long after the original Qu’ran was compiled, and a much longer time since Lehiyim, or Lehites as a tribe existed in Arabia. The land any tribe occupies is traditionally named after that tribe; thus, Americans are the “tribe” occupying America, French occupy France, the English occupy England, and so on.
Think: make a left turn at Nahom. See 1 Ne 16:34: “And it came to pass that Ishmael died, and was buried in the place which was called Nahom.”
Cities along the Frankincense trade route from Jerusalem to the Nile Valley, and from Jerusalem to the southern Arabian Peninsula, were frequently Jewish cities. With one notable exception, that city ownership tidbit was figured out only in the past century. When Muhammad, the founder of Islam, first arrived in Madinah around 632 AD, he encountered two warring Jewish tribes – or what we might now call trading corporations – and set himself up as a judge and dispassionate arbiter of their conflicts. It worked – and 1.3 billion people today at least read his dialect of Semitic as a result. However, the trading lingua franca of 600 BC in the region was not Arabic, but Egyptian – the language of the Nile River Valley, the geographic center of the huge trade network in spices. Egyptian writing by that time had evolved its written form from clumsy and tedious hieroglyphs to a phonetic shorthand called Demotic.
That’s a long way around to point you at 1Nephi 1:2. “Yea, I make a record in the language of my father, which consists of the learning of the Jews and the language of the Egyptians.”
The Frankincense Trail was actually a series of sub-parallel routes mainly predicated on where the oases were – which were themselves controlled by a long scarp, part of the tear-apart fabric of the first of two Red-Sea-opening rifting events. One chain of springs runs close to the coast where the groundwater finally reaches the sea.
Another chain of oases followed the uplifted scarp left over when the Red Sea originally split apart the Arabian-Nubian continental craton 35-30 million years ago. These cliffs rise to nearly 2,000 meters (7,000 feet) high, high enough to trap passing clouds. As the air rises, it cools and drops its moisture, which collects in a line of springs at the base of that scarp – a line hundreds of kilometers long running parallel to the Red Sea. One of those springs is the famous Zamzam Well of Makkah. A devout Muslim wishes to be buried in a shroud dipped in Zamzam water, lying on his left side, with his face towards Makkah.
That’s a long way around to point you at 1 Ne 2:5. “And he came down by the borders near the shore of the Red Sea; and he traveled in the wilderness in the borders which are nearer the Red Sea; and he did travel in the wilderness with his family, which consisted of my mother, Sariah, and my elder brothers, who were Laman, Lemuel, and Sam.”
Incidentally, the borders of a tribe were the ridges between the pasturage for their sheep, goats, and camels. In the Hijaz and Tihamma Plain along the east side of the Red Sea, there are frequent ridges of lava running out to the sea, some as recent as the previous millennium, triggered by the ongoing second opening of the Red Sea, something that won’t be completely opened for another several million years: “The borders which are nearer the Red Sea.”
The city of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where we lived as a family for four years, has several of those springs. The humidity, heat, and salt in the air from the proximal Red Sea were murder on our car – and for that matter on any iron or steel, including steel bows that became available to wealthier traders around 600 to 700 BC…
…and that’s a long way around to point you at 1 Ne 16: 13-14. “And it came to pass that we traveled for the space of four days, nearly a south-southeast direction, and we did pitch our tents again; and we did call the name of the place Shazer. And it came to pass that we did take our bows and our arrows, and go forth into the wilderness to slay food for our families; and after we had slain food for our families we did return again to our families in the wilderness, to the place of Shazer [where Nephi’s steel bow broke]. And we did go forth again in the wilderness, following the same direction, keeping in the most fertile parts of the wilderness, which were in the borders near the Red Sea”.
As you arrived at the Yemen part of the route, you had a choice of paths: one choice was to go south and then east, and pay a tax that helped sustain the great Sabaean Kingdom (remember the fabulously wealthy Queen of Sheba/Saba who visited King Solomon?). The alternative route was to skip the taxes and take a sharp eastward turn at a place called Nahom. However, you had to risk crossing the desert, where for over 5,000 years bandit tribes have made a living by preying upon spice caravans (Thesiger, 1959). If you took the cheap route, you sure didn’t want to light any fires to give your location away – even if you could find enough firewood in the edge of the incredibly desolate Empty Quarter to burn in the first place. You had to eat raw or sun-dried goat meat.
You could still nurse your babies, however (1 Ne 17:2). “And so great were the blessings of the Lord upon us, that while we did live upon raw meat in the wilderness, our women did give plenty of suck for their children, and were strong, yea, even like unto the men; and they began to bear their journeyings without murmurings.”
Incidentally, the Muslim holy city of Madinah lies along one of these strings of oases. The name Madinah mean “city” in Arabic, so its full name is Madinah al-Munawarrah, or the City of Lights. Madinah in 632 AD was a Jewish trading city – occupied by two rival Jewish tribes. When the Muslim prophet Mohammed was driven out of Makkah, he arrived at Madinah and offered as an outsider to arbitrate between the two feuding sides.
Who do you suppose could make their way through such a dangerous trail, and who could communicate with the Jewish sub-tribes or trading corporations controlling the towns around the oases in the trading language of the day? How about a family of Jewish traders already familiar with the trade system and network? A large family or a small sub-tribe – perhaps with a name like… the Lehites. It turns out that the names Lehi (Lehiyyim) and Nephi (Nefiyyim) are both known from antiquity in south-central Arabia (Stubbs, 2016). And who could translate the records they carried with them, and wrote as they traveled, in a language long lost to history, more than twelve centuries later, than an inspired prophet?
Because of these and other evidence of the ancient Semitic origin of the Book of Mormon, the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ has approved the following statement:
“When a sacred text is translated into another language or rewritten into more familiar language, there are substantial risks that this process may introduce doctrinal errors or obscure evidence of its ancient origin. To guard against these risks, the First Presidency and Council of the Twelve give close personal supervision to the translation of scriptures from English into other languages and have not authorized efforts to express the doctrinal content of the Book of Mormon in familiar or modern English”. (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints Handbook 2, Administering the Church, p.74). Emphasis ours.