Ancient Treaty AD 353

Abstract: An alliance celebrated on February 26, AD 353 at the Maya site of Tortuguero in modern Tabasco may be the same treaty the Nephites entered into with the Lamanites and the Gadianton robbers ca. AD 350 as recorded in Mormon 2:28.

Tortuguero is one of the westernmost Maya sites, about 20 km SE of Macuspana, Tabasco. It is 46 km NW of Palenque, Chiapas, and 94 km NW of Tonina, Chiapas. It is 107 km SE of Comalcalco, Tabasco, which is generally regarded as the westernmost Maya site. As with all images on this blog, click to enlarge.

Tortuguero and Environs

Tortuguero Monument 6 is a well-known stela from the site. Most of the stone carving is housed today in the Carlos Pellicer Museum in Villahermosa. One fragment from the stela is housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Monument 6 gained notoriety in the years leading up to 2012 because it references the 13-Baktun period ending event on 13.0.0.0.0 (Winter Solstice, December 21, 2012). Maya long count dates in this article are shown in standard baktun (144,000 days), katun (7,200 days), tun (360 days), uinal (20 days), kin (1 day) format. Gregorian dates are from the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of the American Indian Maya Calendar Converter. 

Monument 6 celebrates a structure dedication event held on January 11, 669 in the latter part of the reign of Balaam Ajaw who ruled Tortuguero from AD 644 - 679. Key early events in Balaam Ajaw's reign as recorded on Monument 6 include:

• 9.10.11.3.9 (2/06/644) An alliance facilitated by a marriage.
• 9.10.11.3.10 (2/07/644) Balaam Ajaw's accession to the throne.
• 9.10.11.9.6 (5/30/644) First war against a rival kingdom.
• 9.10.17.2.14 (12/18/649) Major war against Comalcalco that resulted in "blood became a lake, skulls became a mountain".

This information is from Sven Gronemeyer and Barbara MacLeod, "What Could Happen in 2012: A Re-analysis of the 13-Bak'tun Prophecy on Tortuguero Monument 6," Wayeb Notes, No. 34, 2010.

One of Balaam Ajaw's objectives in erecting Monument 6 was to legitimize his lineage and power over a large expanse of time. Thus, the monument contemplates a far-off event more than a millennium in the future. The Maya also observed cycles in the passage of time. In that vein, the AD 644 alliance recalled another treaty (literally "bound the word") reached long-ago on 8.15.16.0.5 (2/26/353) that Gronemeyer and MacLeod describe as "a great political accord both worthy of distant recall, yet impersonal, and a milestone in the collective memory of the Baakiil lineage."

In Mormon 2:28-29 the Nephites negotiated a treaty with 1) the Lamanites and 2) the robbers of Gadianton which ended Nephite presence in the land southward and bought the doomed nation 10 years of temporary peace. This treaty was finalized ca. AD 350. Mormon's Codex (John L. Sorenson's apt name for the Book of Mormon) and Tortuguero Monument 6 may be describing the same political agreement. A few reasons this makes some sense:

1. Mormon gathered the Nephites into the city of Desolation on the extreme southern border of the land northward (Mormon 3:5-7). The Book of Mormon map with the highest degree of fit to the text (100% satisfaction of 247 basic criteria) correlates the city of Desolation with El Paredon on the shores of Mar Muerto in Chiapas. If Paredon is Desolation, then the western Maya in Tonina (216 km distant) or Tortuguero (230 km distant) could have been part of the Lamanites.

2. Numerous lines of reasoning support the idea that the Gadianton Robbers could have been Teotihuacanos. See the blog articles "Robbers and Lamanites" and "Notes on the Maya and Teotihuacan." Right at the time Tortuguero Monument 6 reports a political agreement (AD 353), Teotihuacan influence was spreading throughout the Maya area. Close to AD 350 Maya elites living in Teotihuacan suffered persecution and death. Then in AD 378 (near the time of the Nephite demise at Cumorah) military emissaries allied with Teotihuacan forced regime change in Tikal. Teotihuacan influence is known from Palenque and Panhale which are geographically close to Tortuguero. See the lecture David Stuart gave at Dumbarton Oaks on December 1, 2022 entitled Rulers from the West: Teotihuacan in Maya History and Politics.  See also Armando Anaya H., Peter Mathews, and Stanley Guenter, "A New Inscribed Wooden Box from Southern Mexico" in Mesoweb Reports, August 27, 2001. If the Gadiantons were Teotihuacanos, then the AD 353 treaty ratified at Tortuguero could have involved them.

3. The Tortuguero AD 644 alliance was followed by war, then a few years later by a decisive war that inflicted heavy casualties on Comalcalco. In the cyclical way the Maya viewed time, the AD 353 alliance could also have presaged war. Monument 6 does not explicitly mention war following the AD 353 accord, but the text has many allusions to war as Gronemeyer and MacLeod point out. So, if the AD 353 alliance did involve the Nephites, the massive destruction at Ramah/Cumorah ca. AD 385 could be implied. The Book of Mormon map with the highest degree of fit to the text correlates Ramah/Cumorah with Cerro San Martin Pajapan in the eastern Tuxtlas of southern Veracruz. Pajapan is 160 straight line kilometers due west of Comalcalco. See the blog article Ramah/Cumorah.

There are enough if/then conditionals in this logic chain to make this correlation tentative, but the ca. AD 350 treaty mentioned in Mormon 2:28-29 is thoroughly plausible. Its in a time and place when far-flung projections of military force were creating new alignments of power between allies and enemies. At minimum the Book of Mormon treaty has a known contemporaneous parallel in the historical record of the Tortuguero royal dynasty.

Nineteenth Century English in and around Palmyra New York

 In 2014 I published a blog article entitled "Early Modern English."

The next year I published another article entitled "English in the Book of Mormon."

Both articles support the idea from Royal Skousen and Stanford Carmack that the language Joseph Smith dictated to his scribes in 1829 was primarily Early Modern English. Nothing I have encountered in the intervening years has convinced me otherwise. But, I have run across people who wonder if an archaic form of English may have been spoken by rural people in the Palmyra, New York frontier area during Joseph's lifetime. After all, we know that Appalachian English aka Smoky Mountain English aka Southern Mountain English is an oral linguistic phenomenon known to science that persists today in the mountainous area from southern New York to northern Mississippi and Alabama.

Point #1: Appalachian English is not a fossilized form of Early Modern English preserved in isolation in the hills and hollers of the region. It has much stronger affinities with 18th century American Colonial English which is generally considered Modern English. Scotch Irish influences from northern Ireland are widely recognized. See A Handbook of Varieties of English (Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2004) and  Michael Montgomery, "How Scotch-Irish is your English?" in The Journal of East Tennessee History, Vol. 67 (2005).

Point #2: English in most parts of colonial North America was surprisingly uniform. Historical linguists such as Paul K. Longmore and Joey L. Dillard discuss "linguistic levelling" and the "American koiné" that they attribute to extensive travel and migration and the rapid assimilation of immigrants speaking Dutch, French, German, Swedish, and other western European tongues. "By the early to mid-eighteenth century, varieties of English emerged that many observers perceived as both homogenous and matching metropolitan (London) standard English." Paul K. Longmore, "Good English without Idiom or Tone: The Colonial Origins of American Speech" in Journal of Interdisciplinary History Vol. 37:4 (Spring, 2007). The nation building that accompanied the American Revolutionary War (1775 - 1783) further standardized a language that was already much more normalized than the regional dialects prevalent in Britain at the time. John Witherspoon, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, was born in Scotland. He observed that Americans had geographic, occupational, and social mobility so they were "not so liable to local peculiarities either of accent or phraseology." Very high American birth rates added to the linguistic levelling effect since native born colonials quickly came to vastly outnumber immigrants. Intercontinental travelers and long-term settlers such as Hugh Jones, William Eddis, Jonathan Boucher, and many others were impressed with the homogeneity they found in American speech patterns. See "They Speak Better English than the English Do: Colonialism and the Origins of National Linguistic Standardization in America" in Early American Literature Vol. 40 No. 2 (2005). Eighteenth century British visitors marveled at the "striking uniformity" of the English spoken by American colonists. "The American Koine - Origin, Rise, and Plateau Stage" in Kansas Journal of Sociology, Vol. 9 No. 2 (1973),

Point #3. Joseph Smith, Emma Hale Smith, Martin Harris, Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, and others associated with the coming forth of the Book of Mormon precisely matched the demographic profile described above: geographically, occupationally, and socially mobile.

Point #4. The Erie Canal was under construction from 1817 - 1825. It runs right through Palmyra, New York. Construction was a polyglot enterprise employing thousands. Once it began operation, people from around the world traveled on it routinely. It connected Buffalo on Lake Erie to Albany on the Hudson River to New York City on the Atlantic. Palmyra was not a bucolic backwater. After 1825 it was highly integrated into the global economy of the time. Click to enlarge the map below.

1825 Map of the Erie Canal. The Red Arrow Indicates Palmyra.

Point #5. Beginning about 1760 there was a conscious effort among American nationalists to further standardize language throughout the colonies. This was considered a social, economic, and military good. Luminaries such as Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) and Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) fostered the movement. Noah Webster (1758-1843) eventually became a leader in the cause which culminated in his celebrated 1828 dictionary of American English.

Point #6. Methodism was the fastest growing faith community in North America from 1766 through the 1820's, largely due to circuit riders. These itinerant preachers traveled widely and their far-flung influence helped standardize linguistic patterns throughout the country. See William A. Powell, Jr. "Methodist circuit-riders in America, 1766 - 1844." Master's thesis, Paper 813, University of Richmond (1977). 

So, the notion that the archaic language in the earliest Book of Mormon text originated in or was intended to communicate colloquially with upstate New York seems far-fetched. We have a fair sampling of Joseph's personal words and a larger sampling of his mother's words. Both spoke Modern English as we would expect given their cultural origins in 1805 Vermont and 1775 New Hampshire respectively.