The use of metal plates for record keeping has always been interesting to members and nonmembers of the Church alike since the days when Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon from plates. The earliest people in the Book of Mormon, the Jaredites, who migrated from the Mesopotamian region in the third millennium, B.C., left records on 24 gold plates. These plates were found in the time of King Mosiah. Lehi took with him from Jerusalem some “brass” plates, and his son Nephi made plates which in our day eight witnesses said had “the appearance of gold.”

Some early critics of the Book of Mormon argued that the use of metal plates for record keeping was not reasonable because metallurgy was not advanced sufficiently in ancient times to produce the materials and that no such records had been found anyway. In Joseph Smith’s day with the limited information then avail able, such criticism seemed plausible, but not in our day. A large number of metal plates with records have been found, particularly in the last few years; and this must be only a small fraction of those made and used anciently.

In Joseph Smith’s day little was known of ancient civilizations; modern archaeology had not begun. John Lloyd Stephens had not yet started for Central America (1839), Schliemann had not yet started to dig out Homer’s fabled Troy (the 1870s), and Champoilion was making the first real progress on Egyptian hieroglyphics with the help of Thomas Young (1822). Today, how

ever, there is a great variety of examples of the use of metal plates for record keeping by even the earliest civilizations and in many regions. It seems that when important information was to be preserved, care was taken to use non-perishable materials such as metals, stone and baked clay. Wood, leather and paper required special conditions for preservation.

For conciseness, a table of examples is shown on the following page; and for visualization, a map on the inside back cover shows the location of records found. The exact place of discovery of the individual plates and other details, such as when they were made, are often not known definitely and are therefore to be considered as approximate.

It is interesting to notice as David Diringer does in his book The Alphabet the many instances of writing one language in the script of another, and also the considerable number of languages and scripts with which so far not much progress has been made in translation.

One of the most striking examples of the recent discovery of plates is of those found in modern Iran. Six plates of silver or gold have the same text. At Persepolis two pairs of plates, with one of silver and one of gold in each pair, were found at two foundation corners. The four plates were 13 inches square with writing in cuneiform characters of the same text in three languages: Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian. A gold plate is shown in the picture above and was taken by John W. Payne in the Tehran museum. At Ecbatana (modern Hamadan), a gold tablet was found 7.5 inches square and a silver one 4.1 x 5.3 inches with the same writing as the Persepolis plates. These plates date from 518 to 515 B.C. during the reign of the great Persian king, Darius I. For further data, see tablets Nos. 17-19 on the opposite page.

The great museums of the world now have many such plates. For example there are many bronze plates or tablets from Lehi’s time from South Arabia. Some in the British Museum, London, are shown in the Encyclopedia Britannica article on “Arabia,” and were apparently those referred to by Sir Richard Burton. Sir Richard, the famous traveler and translator of the Arabian Nights, after visiting Salt Lake City, wrote in 1861 in City of the Saints'

“As regards the golden plates [of Joseph Smith] it is contended that the Jews of old were in the habit of writing upon papyrus, parchment, and so on, not upon metal, and that such plates have never been found in America. But of late years Himyaritic inscriptions upon brass tablets

have been forwarded from Yemen [south Arabia] to the British Museum . . ."

There are some traditions of records on metal plates in America, but there are not any with appreciable writing similar to the plates of the Old World which have survived destruction. Though almost all the precious metals discovered by the Spanish conquerors were melted down, there has since been found much wonderful metalwork, such as that shown in Pal Kelemen’s Medieval American Art. There are many plates of copper, gold, silver and their alloys with various designs and figures.

In museums there are a number of sheets of thin gold or silver which would be suitably for record keeping. Examples in gold are to be found in a museum in Lima, Peru; Guatamala City, Guatamala; the National Museum, Mexico City; the Museum of the American Indian and the Metropolitan Museum, New York City, and the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco.

The scores of plates shown in the table indicate that the ancients did indeed use metal plates for preserving important records!