{FN} Parley P. Pratt.
Is it not remarkable that those plates, though giving an account of Jews, were engraved in Egyptian characters? And that Smith, though confessedly an ignorant man and a poor writer, could translate Egyptian, one of the most difficult languages in the world? We are skeptical and can only say, show us the golden plates and the Urim and Thummim, and it sufficeth us. We are persuaded that Joseph Smith did not find any such plates, but that he preceded Barnum in discovering that "the American people delight to be humbugged."
We desire now to consider what is designated as the Phoenician theory.
Intelligent investigators who use reason in their inquiries sufficiently to be incapable of accepting the absurdities of monkish fancy, maintained that this civilization came originally from the Phoenicians. To those who believe that this civilization was imported, this seems more reasonable than any other theory, for more can be said to give it the appearance of probability.
It is well known that the Phoenicians were preeminent as the colonizing navigators of antiquity. They were an enlightened and enterprising maritime people, whose commerce traversed every known sea, and extended its operations beyond the "Pillars of Hercules" into the "Great Exterior Ocean." The early Greeks said of these people that they "went everywhere from the extreme East to the extreme West, multiplying settlements on all seas." But the great ages of this race are in the distant past, far beyond the beginning of recorded history. Indeed, history has knowledge of only a few of their later communities—the Sabeans of Southern Arabia, the people of Tyre and Sidon, the Carthaginians, and the settlements on the coast of Spain and Britain. In fact, the Phoenicians gave the name to Great Britain which it still retains, that of Brittan-nock, the land of tin. It is not difficult to believe that communities of Phoenicians were established all around the Mediterranean, and even beyond the Strait of Gibraltar, in ages quite as old as Egypt or Chaldea, and that they had communication with this hemisphere. Why did the ancients say so much about a "great Saturnian Continent" beyond the Atlantic if nobody in prehistoric ages had ever seen that continent? They said it was there and we know they were right; but whence came their knowledge of it, and such knowledge as led them to describe it as "larger than Asia (meaning Asia Minor), Europe and Libya together?" This ancient belief must have been due to the fact that their greatest navigators, the Phoenicians, had communication with America in early prehistoric times.
The Phoenicians undoubtedly had more communication with this continent than they had with surrounding nations with reference to it. They of all the ancient peoples knew how to keep state secrets. They would rather supply other nations with gold, silver, precious stones, tin, peacocks, ivory, almug wood, and other commodities, than to tell whence they obtained them. The voyages to this continent must have taken place at a very remote period, which was imperfectly recollected and never fully revealed to other nations.
But they must have had some vague knowledge of ancient America, as is shown by Plutarch's mention of a "Great Saturnian Continent beyond the Cronian Sea," meaning the Atlantic Ocean, and the fact that Solon brought from Egypt to Athens the story of the Atlantic Island, which was not entirely new in Greece. Humbolt tells us that Procles, an ancient Carthaginian historian, says:
"The historians who speak of the islands of the exterior sea (the Atlantic Ocean) tell us that in their time there were seven islands consecrated to Proserpine, and three others, of immense extent, of which the first was consecrated to Plato, {sic Pluto?} the second to Ammon, and the third to Neptune. The inhabitants of the latter had preserved a recollection (transmitted to them by their ancestors) of the island Atlantis, which was extremely large, and for a longtime held sway over all the Islands of the Atlantic Ocean."
Diodorus Siculus, another great historian, who lived about forty years before the Christian era, gives this account of a country which was evidently Mexico, or Central America: