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| Implications of Epi-Olmec Studies for the Book of Mormon |
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In the ethnohistory of Mesoamerica, the Olmec were the dominant politico-cultural influence prior to the rise of the Maya city states. Historically, the Maya rose to power after the demise of the Olmec. As with all generalizations, however, the transition from Olmec to Maya was not abrupt in either time nor space. It is in the linguistic frontier between these powerful cultures that this new information on hieroglyphs potentially touches the Book of Mormon. For both time and spatial reasons, the Olmec match up well with the Jaredites. The Maya fit well with the Nephite time and spatial distribution. This is not to say that the Jaredites were the Olmec, nor that the Maya were the Nephites, but rather that Book of Mormon peoples could have participated on both of those cultures. The Book of Mormon location of interest here is Zarahemla. Prior to the arrival of the Nephites the Zarahemlahites had contact with at least one important Jaredite (Coriantumr, see Omni 1:21), and the names prevalent in Zarahema are suggestive of contact with Jaredite culture. Thus the story of Zarahemla in the book of Mormon shows a city that carries potential influence from the Jaredite even though the city was located to the south of the Jaredite homeland. The proposed location of Zarahemla in the Limited Tehuantepec theory of the Book of Mormon, places Zarahemla directly in the borderlands between the Maya and Olmec. The new research on the linguistics of this area may have interesting implications for the Book of Mormon. The best candidate for the language of the Olmecs is Mixe-Zoque, a reconstructed language which fits the geographical distribution of Olmec culture, and the glottal-chronological time depth. This was first proposed in the 1970's, and has become fairly widely accepted. After the time of the Olmecs, the proto-language split into two branches, the Mixe and the Zoque, each of which still occupies the geographic area of the Olmec homeland. In the excitement concerning the translation of the Maya glyphs, there has been much less attention paid to other glyphic scripts. There are possible attestations of two to three separate glyphic writing systems in Mesoamerica, but none have the large number of texts that the Maya glyphs enjoy. One of the systems, however, has had a stela recently made public which contains over 540 glyphs, and is the largest single text of a non-Mayan writing system which has been labeled Epi-Olmec; "Olmec" because of the geographical location of the texts, and "epi" because the texts post-date the archaeological Olmecs. The second major attestation of this system is on the "Tuxtla statuette". Both texts may now be largely deciphered. The stela dates to approximately 160 AD, and can be shown to be related to the Zoquean branch of language. This dates it to after the Mixe-Zoque split. The first implication for Book of Mormon studies is the geography. The Eastern edge of the Epi-Olmec glyph system includes Chiapa de Corzo, a candidate for Sidom in Sorenson's correlation (a shard with the Epi-Olmec writing system was found in Chiapa de Corzo). This makes the possibility that Zarahemla (Santa Rosa in Sorenson's correlation) would also fall on the Epi-Olmec fringe. Of course that fits with Zarahemla as a Jaredite (Olmec?) influenced site. The arrival of Nephites from a Maya speaking zone would then be a logical language difference, with the Zarahemlahites on the Zoquean frontier. From a linguistic standpoint, it is also therefore explicable why the Zeniffites could not read the Jaredite records, but that they could be read when returned to Zarahemla. Of course the gift of God is a capable translator, but there may have been another answer, an answer related to the closer heritage of the epi-Olmec periphery to the knowledge of the Olmec writing system. A second implication for the Book of Mormon is the existence of multiple scripts in Mesoamerica. There is no requirement that the Book of Mormon be in any specific known script, since there were many, and there are clearly lost texts from earlier time periods. There is also glyphic evidence that the Maya system borrowed from the earlier Epi-Olmec. A particular sign has a similar sign in both Epi-Olmec and Maya, and reads phonetically as wu in both systems. In both systems it is also used for "great, large", but that is not the phonetically correct in Maya. It is, however, in Zoque. This evidence clearly suggests that borrowing did occur, and that the direction of borrowing of glyphic material was from the epi-Olmec to the Maya. So far, the information presented has fit fairly well with the Book of Mormon. There is a major catch, however. The phonetics of the Olmec and therefore probable Jaredites, do not match the Jaredite names in the Book of Mormon. The Mixe-Zoque word structure is CV(?)C where the ? represents an occasional glottal stop. Moreover, the consonant list of Mixe-Zoque reconstructed to the time of the stela contains only: p,t,tz,k,?,s,j,m,n,w,y. The most significant absence from this list are the liquids l,r. For the Book of Mormon, the absence of the "r" is the most difficult, as there are many Jaredite names which use it (Ether, Coriantumr). Compounded with the completely non-standard word structure of a name like Coriantumr, there is no evidence in the extant Jaredite names in the Book of Mormon which would connect them to the language from which they should have come, if the correlation is correct. |
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| by Brant Gardner. Copyright 1998 |
The linguistic advances
in understanding the dominant native languages in Mesoamerica continue to provide tremendous information about
the peoples and interrelations of that area. One of the important developments in the understanding of Mesoamerican
writing systems involves hieroglyphic writing that is not Mayan, but which is demonstrably pre-Mayan.
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