Why would any people want to engrave its scriptures on metal plates rather than writing them on scrolls as the writers of the Bible did? The reason given in the Book of Mormon is a concern for the permanence of the records:
I cannot write but a little of my words, because of the difficulty of engraving our words upon plates; and we know that the things which we write upon plates must remain; but whatsoever things we write upon anything save it be upon plates must perish and vanish away (Jacob 4:1-2).
In theory, something engraved in gold should be permanent, since gold is one of the least reactive substances known to man and will not rust or corrode or decay the way other materials eventually do. In practice, though, we would not expect a document written on gold to be preserved down through the millennia, simply because the material itself is so valuable and so easily cannibalized for other purposes. "Neither moth nor rust doth corrupt" gold, granted, but what about the "thieves break through and steal" bit? Trusting that something will be preserved for future generations simply because it's engraved in gold seems foolish.
With relatively few exceptions, documents of great antiquity which have survived down to the present have done so not because the original was written in some uniquely permanent and incorruptible medium, but because a great number of copies were made, and then copies of those copies, and then copies of copies of copies, and so on.
This process of iterative copying is not perfect, of course, and over time errors and emendations creep into the text. All things considered, though, it's a remarkably effective way of preserving a text for a long period of time. Written language consists of discrete characters, drawn from a finite set and arranged in a linear order, which makes it the kind of thing that can be copied perfectly. It's even possible to memorize a lengthy composition word-for-word and then write down a faithful copy from memory, which is likely how the first written copies of the Homeric epics and the Quran originated.
The words of Homer, who sang nearly three millennia ago, are still readily available today. Of the celebrated works of Parrhasius, four centuries closer to our time than Homer, nothing survives. The reason for this is simply that Homer was a poet, and Parrhasius was a painter, and paintings cannot be copied perfectly by hand the way poems can. If you had the time and the inclination, you could copy down the entire Vulgate Bible by hand, and do so perfectly, even if you didn't understand a word of Latin. Now try to imagine producing, by hand, a perfect copy of this picture of Jerome writing the Vulgate:
Obviously this is impossible. Not just difficult, but strictly impossible. Dürer himself, who created the original, could not have produced a perfect copy by hand. However, many perfect copies were made, and long before modern photographic technology, because what Dürer created was not a painting on canvas but an engraving on a copper plate. This could be used to produce any number of prints, with perfect fidelity, through the technique of intaglio printmaking. The process is illustrated on Wikipedia as follows:
When you hear that Dürer is most famous for his woodcuts and copper engravings, you should not imagine sheets of engraved copper hanging up in a museum somewhere. The copper plate was not the artwork itself, but a means of producing and reproducing countless iterations of it.
As you can see above, the intaglio process involves getting ink into the engraved grooves on the plate and then transferring this ink to paper, creating a perfect mirror-image of the engraving. Although the diagram above makes it look as if this completely removes the ink from the grooves, in fact the grooves remain black with ink even after the print has been made.
In his book The Lost 116 Pages, Don Bradley quotes some little-known early descriptions of the Golden Plates. Citing Orson Pratt, he writes:
The plates, witnesses reported, were partly sealed shut and were engraved with hieroglyphics, in the grooves of which was a "black, hard stain" that contrasted the characters against the golden page.
He also quotes a similar description given by Francis Gladden Bishop:
The characters are rubbed over with a black substance so as to fill them up, in order that the dazzling of the gold between the characters would not prevent their being readily seen.
Both Pratt and Bishop apparently understood the black ink to be in the grooves for the purpose of contrast, to make it easier to read the text directly from the plates. Doesn't it seem likelier, though, that this black stain is an indication that the Golden Plates, like the copper plates of Dürer, were primarily used for making prints? Of course, one could read directly from the plates, but the text would be in mirror image. Perhaps a pair of specially designed spectacles could correct that, though. Hypothetically speaking.
If I am correct in my hypothesis that the scriptures used by ordinary Nephite literati were intaglio prints from the Plates, that would suggest that their sacred writings had a form that made this particular form of copying necessary -- that the "text" on the Plates was much more like Saint Jerome in His Study than it was like the Vulgate Bible. Had they relied on low-fidelity hand-copying to preserve it, much of the content would rapidly have "perished and vanished away."
It is interesting to note in this connection that, in addition to texts in the narrow sense, Joseph Smith introduced certain pictures into the canon of sacred writings, and that these were of Egyptian origin. Take for example this Facsimile from the Book of Abraham:
I don't want to get into questions about this facsimile in particular -- Joseph Smith interpreted about half of it as being about a rather cryptic astronomical theory and left the rest of it a mystery, while modern scholars see it as a common funerary talisman -- but simply to note the significance of the fact that this picture, just as much as the text of the Bible or Book of Mormon, is part of the scriptural canon of the Latter-day Saints. The facsimile as we have it is an excellent example of my point about it being impossible to produce perfect copies of pictures by hand, as it is pretty clearly a copy of a copy of a copy, from which much of the detail has been lost or corrupted. It's a pity that Abraham didn't use intaglio printing technology instead of writing "by his own hand upon papyrus"!
This, according to Joseph Smith, is an example of what Egyptian scripture looks like. Both the Golden Plates and the Brass Plates, we know, were written in the Egyptian manner (see 1 Ne. 1:2, Mosiah 1:4, Morm. 9:32). Is it possible that the engravings on the Plates consisted of, or at least included, similar "facsimiles"? For evidence of that, I turn again to Don Bradley's indispensable work. According to Charles Anthon, who looked at characters hand-copied from the Golden Plates:
The characters were "arranged in perpendicular columns, and the whole ended in a rude delineation of a circle divided into various compartments, decked with various strange marks." Anthon saw in this circular design an echo of "the Mexican Calendar given by Humboldt," meaning the Aztec calendar published by Alexander Von Humboldt in 1814.
Anthon wrote this well before Joseph Smith had purchased the papyri from which the Book of Abraham was produced, but doesn't that description -- "a rude delineation of a circle divided into various compartments, decked with various strange marks" -- sound exactly like Facsimile 2? As with that facsimile, I attribute the "rudeness" of the delineation to the fact that it was a hand-drawn copy. Presumably the original on the Plate was anything but rude. If this was indeed the character of the Nephite records, the need for intaglio printing to preserve the details intact is evident.
Finally, there's the question of why the Nephite and Jaredite plates were gold but Laban's were brass. Given the costliness of gold, there must have been some compelling reason for using it, but the existence of Laban's plates seems to indicate that brass -- cheaper, lighter, less susceptible to deformation -- would have served just as well. In fact, copper and zinc (the components of brass) remain the favored materials for intaglio plates. How to account for the use of both types of plates, gold and brass?
Here's my theory. In almost all ways, brass plates would be preferable to gold in practical terms. The chief value of gold is (1) that it does not corrode and (2) that it is so expensive as to make the production of unauthorized "fake" gold plates by private citizens impractical. I propose that gold plates were rarely used directly, but were kept (by kings or chief priests) as the "gold standard" guaranteeing the authenticity of all copies. Prints from the gold plates were used to create brass plates, and these brass plates (which were more portable, and of which there could be multiple copies) were used to create the prints in common use. In the event that the gold plates were themselves lost, prints from authenticated brass plates could be used to create a new set of gold plates -- an extremely expensive undertaking beyond the means of anyone outside the kingly or priestly establishment.
Laban was an important man, but not that important."He can command fifty" -- what is that, like a first lieutenant? He was entrusted with a brass-plate copy of the Josephite record, not with the original gold. Given the many centuries separating Joseph from Laban, it seems likely that the gold-plate record was no longer extant. It also appears that Laban or his associates were making brass-plate copies of the words of contemporary prophets, like Jeremiah, who would not yet have reached the stage of being canonized in gold.
Lehi seems to have understood that brass, unlike gold, is not an imperishable medium: "Wherefore, he said that these plates of brass should never perish; neither should they be dimmed any more by time" (1 Ne. 5:19).This reads most naturally as a prophecy that the Brass Plates will be miraculously preserved, and the statement that they should not "be dimmed any more by time" suggests that they had already been considerably dimmed.
So that's my current theory on plates. As I continue to reread the Book of Mormon, with this theory in mind, I'll see if it helps any puzzle pieces fall into place or if it all just ends in a stupor of thought causing me to forget the thing that was wrong.
