My friends,
I am sorry to be able only now to get back to some of your comments, concerns, and critique. Following the time-honored tradition of Mormon apologetic discourse, let me say only that I could not reply sooner because my wife and I were at a foreign film festival that we learned about from a former official in the Turkish government—I can't say who, of course—whom I had met at a conference on a recent Romanian translation of the works of Mark Twain (which I highly recommend, by the way).
In any case, I thank all of you for taking my very dense posts seriously enough to read them. Despite
the haughty dismissal by some apologists of this place as "a trailer park"—a phrase in which I detect a disturbing undertone of upper middle class snobbery—I have found it to be a collegial community, even as a rather infrequent poster. I find their disdain puzzling, because
we are explicitly counseled by the Lord's anointed to shun contention. I fear that Jaredite Studies may have been set back a decade or more because of a passionately defended but ultimately irrational assertion that one cannot do valuable scholarship in Jaredite Studies ironically. I reject that premise, and I am saddened that, because of this pointless quarrel, we may have lost sight of our ultimate goal:
the faith of an anonymous Relief Society sister in Parowan, Utah. I hope one day to find out who she is, but more than that, I hope that our humble contributions here to Jaredite Studies can be made to strengthen her faith.
Regarding the issue of dating that Zeezrom has raised and how this might affect my argument that the Jaredites spoke an Indo-European dialect closely related to Greek and Indo-Iranian, I have two points. The first is that, while the migration was likely early bronze age, it could as well have been middle bronze age, which witnessed its own series of large-scale migrations, one of which (the Hyksos) has already been referenced here. Moroni, like later Biblical scholars, has taken the Babel story too literally. What happened at Babel was a confounding of the languages, but linguistics make it impossible that this was the origins of
all languages. In light of the rhetorical strategy of Genesis and Ether 1, what is at stake here are the languages of the descendants of Shem and those of Japheth. Obviously, Semitic existed before Babel and in my view the "confounding of languages" is the point at which Indo-European speakers came into the world. Without the ability to be understood any longer by Semitic speakers, the new Indo-European speakers had no choice but to migrate. It is at this point that the sons of Shem and the sons of Japeth separated (Hamites, of course, had already been cut off from that part of the human family descended from Noah). Many became and remained nomads, but for the most part that eternal wandering has ended only recently with the demise of European colonialism. Moroni's interest, as I think I have shown above, was in the Japhethites, and Babel is the point at which they became linguistically differentiated from their Semitic brethren.
The second point is a clarification: I don't think we have to assume that, even if linguistically related to Greeks, the Jaredites were Mycenaean (though they may have been). Linear B just happens to be the earliest written form of Greek that we have, and although the earliest attestation of Linear B is towards the end of the Middle Bronze Age, it was doubtlessly used earlier. The only earlier attested Indo-European language, Hittite, is also graphically represented in a syllabic script, and, like Linear B, that script also does not distinguish for the most part between several different kinds of phonological features that we know from other evidence must have been present in the language (voiced vs. unvoiced consonants, for instance, just as in Linear B). Hittite is also notable in showing the fluidity of liquid consonants in graphic representation: l vs. n in Hittite (cf. Hittite
la-a-man, "name," vs. Latin
nōmen), which has a parallel in Linear B r vs. l (already discussed above). The point is that, in light of other graphic representations of early Indo-European languages the Jaredite script is most likely to have been a syllabic one. Most scripts of this and earlier periods are syllabic, and indeed one could easily make the argument that so-called consonantal scripts (e.g. all those descended from proto-Sinaitic) are basically syllabic. Even the devanagari used for Sanskrit is basically a syllabic. Syllabic scripts, especially when borrowed from other language families, face certain constraints depending on the phonological system they are intended to represent, and since the archaeology you've brought in seems to suggest an Aegean or Helladic setting for the Jaredites, it seemed to me a safe assumption that some of the constraints inherent to Linear B might also have been inherent to the Jareditish script, especially if the languages are related, and the archaeology seems to fit that narrative. So, even if it were an earlier script, it seems to me that it must have been something like what we have in Linear B, and that therefore Linear B can be useful in reconstructing Jareditish phonology.
Moreover, the stage of Greek represented by Linear B is extremely archaic in its phonology and morphology. As some Indo-European scholars have pointed out recently, it's practically identical with what has been reconstructed for Late Indo-European itself. So, while the tablets we do have may be 15th century BC, the language is clearly much older, and it is reasonable to assume that their were probably centuries' worth of Linear B tablets preceding what we do have. And of course, Linear B is descended from Linear A, the Minoan script that goes back at least to 2500 BC. Added to all of this, I think that what you have said about the Phaistos Disc is most illuminating—were the Minoans and the Jaredites perhaps related? We can only speculate, but I think the convergence of these various strands of evidence makes a strong case for an eastern Mediterranean setting for the Jaredites.
Regarding the Egyptian connections adduced by the noble Kishkumen, I can only say that I am skeptical. I reject out of hand any appeal to Arabic sources, since they are notoriously unreliable and fanciful, and whatever the strengths of the Arabic linguistic tradition in synchronic linguistics, the tradition has very little useful to offer from the perspective of historical linguistic information. An apologist has recently reminded us, "linguistics evidence" is "hard" and "verifiable." In theory, it should be, and this is why I find Egyptian evidence so problematic from the linguistic perspective: there is rarely anything in Egyptian against which to verify a hunch. For me, this is the explanatory strength of an Indo-European hypothesis: I can find parallels in not one, not two, but three different traditions: Vedic Sanskrit, Old Avestan, and Greek (some of these I hope to show in the future are even stronger). And these parallels are not completely subjective; they operate on the level of both phonology and—the clincher for me—morpho-syntax, linguistic features which are less rooted in their interpreter's subjective impressions than cultural patterns. And given what Zeezrom has shown in terms of the archaeology (despite being "soft, nonverifiable evidence" according to some apologists), I simply find the weight of evidence too great to ignore for the sake of clinging to an apologetic tradition that gives centrality to Egypt. And then of course there is still the problem, in privileging Egypt, of how it is that the Jaredite beekeepers needed anything at all from Egypt for their discourse of bee-keeping. In short, the Egyptian connections are more than possible but remain only plausible for me, not probable.
So, it remains my contention that
deseret is Moroni's realization of *
de-se-re-ta, which is what was expressed in the syllabic script of the Jaredites on the plates from which he translated. I further maintain that *
de-se-re-ta was the graphic representation of a spoken *
deseletes, "that which wonders from the home." There are phonlogical, morpho-syntactic, and semantic correspondences for these in three independent languages attested in the archaeological milieu described by Zeezrom, and even the metaphor can be seen in Homer. I am looking at what the underlying Jareditish may have been, and I see no linguistic evidence that there is anything Egyptian about it, and I can't see why cultural evidence with little linguistic basis should be enough to ignore "hard, verifiable" linguistic evidence.
Nonetheless, the cultural connections that Kishkumen has brilliantly articulated here are extremely compelling. Can we reconcile these two strands of interpretation in order to a probable hypothesis ? I believe that we can.
I think, noble Kishkumen, that you have thoroughly shown how deeply enmeshed Moroni was in Egyptian scribal habits and lore. I think you are right, then, that we might be looking at two different phenomena: 1) Jareditish on the one hand and 2) the reception of Jareditish on the other. The Egyptian evidence you've brought in most certainly cannot be ignored, but where I diverge is in its applicability. As you have shown, rather than anything about the Jaredites or their language, the Egyptian evidence opens a window onto the intellectual world of Late Nephite scribes. This is a world of deep learning with a millennium-long tradition behind it, a world whose linguistic medium was largely Hebraic but whose intellectual foundations were Egyptian—and had been since the beginning (1 Ne 1:2). This was not the tradition of the Jaredites by any reading of Ether, but it was the tradition through which the Jaredite
Res Gestae was filtered.
At the same time, though, we should not let the linguistic turn turn us too far away from the path of understanding. If so much of ancient historiography was filtered through the cultural lens of its authors, that does not mean that they have nothing truthful to say, nor should it imply that we can't recover from them any information about their historical subjects. It means only that the expression of that truth can be misleading if we don't understand both its presence and its nature, as well as recognize its limits. To take a more familiar tradition and one closer to home, Ammianus's characterization of the Huns is replete with tropes that had a long history in both Greek and Latin historiographic presentations of the Other, and so it would be a natural conclusion to say that he is merely rehearsing rhetoric, but we know from archaeological evidence (however soft it may be) and comparative anthropology that, in many respects, Ammianus is as accurate as he is rhetorical. Similarly, Moroni's pose may be rhetorical, but it would be too simplistic to say that it was
merely or
only rhetorical. One can be both rhetorical and truthful, so I see no reason to doubt Moroni's statement that
deseret was a Jaredite expression for honeybee.
Thus, it becomes entirely plausible, perhaps even probable, that the Egyptian associations of
dšrt are being activated by Moroni as he transcribes *
de-se-re-ta from the original Jareditish plates—this may even be the reason why he introduces
deseret as an artifact of Jaredite culture and language rather than simply translating it, since in doing so gives himself the opportunity to display his linguistic prowess and thus implicitly his social standing as a scribe highly educated in the Egyptianizing traditions of that culture. Such wordplay among translators is not at all unusual, especially translators keen to advertise their talents, as Moroni no doubt was, and punning of that sort was endemic to Egyptian scribal practice. For him, establishing his learned status no doubt was a tactic in establishing authority among his peers in the present (assuming he was sensitive of the need for peer-review), which in turn serves the larger strategy of confirming to the gentiles—which, for all he knew, reverenced Egyptian scribal culture in the same way that the Nephites had—that his work had divine sanction and that his message had divine origin. How could such elaborate word-play that is still truthful be the work of merely a human mind? Surely, this is a sign and a token of the Lord's handiwork.
Even Nibley's theory about the Red Crown of Lower Egypt could salvaged by redefining its applicability to Late Nephite intellectual history rather than early Jaredite linguistics. This reconciliation has one other added advantage: it parallels quite well with what we now know of authorial strategies in the Book of Mormon, as Grant Hardy has now elucidated. We should expect Moroni both to tell the truth and to do so in a way that would make sense within his own cultural setting. Yet, the attempt to reconcile the two approaches is motivated not only by the weight of evidence and the explanatory power that each has, great as each may be. I feel it imperative for those engaged in Jaredite Studies to follow inspired counsel to shun contention (cf. Hel. 16:22). After all, if we are going to strengthen the belief of that (as of yet) anonymous lady in Parowan, we can hardly do so contentiously, as the apologists so shamefully do.