The Jaredites/Olmecs, the "Giants" of Mesoamerica.

"And now I, Moroni, proceed to give an account of those ancient inhabitants who were destroyed by the hand of the Lord upon the face of this North Country." "And I take mine account from the twenty and four plates which were found by the people of Limhi, which is called the Book of Ether."   (Ether 1:1-2)
"…I [Mormon], give... part of the account... from the tower down until they were destroyed.  And...He that wrote this record was Ether..."   (Ether 1:5-6) 
"And the brother of Jared being a large and mighty man…."   (Ether 1:34)
"…the people repented not of their iniquity..."    (Ether 15:6)  About 300 BC
" …they have brought breastplates, which are large, and they are of brass and of copper..."    (Mosiah 8:10)  About 121 BC
“…they did find a land... which was covered with dry bones; yea, a land which had been peopled and which had been destroyed….”  (Mosiah 21:26)
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Note:    "…men of great stature…giants…”  (Numbers 13:32 -33)   “And the giants of the land…”  (Moses 7:15) 
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The above scriptures and other scriptures indicate the following about these "Jaredite" Book of Mormon people.

1.  The Jaredites came from the Tower of Babel, Mesopotamia, to the Western Hemisphere.
2.  The Jaredites were a large people.
3.  The Jaredite civilization started in the Western Hemisphere about 2900 BC
4.  They repented not of their iniquity and were destroyed about 580 BC   (Maxwell Institute, Years of the Jaredites)
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The archaeological and historical evidence indicates that the ancient people that we call Olmecs in our day are the same people, called the Jaredites in The Book of Mormon. 
Archaeological evidence seems to indicate that the main core or center of the Jaredite civilization was located on the Mexican Gulf Coast, in what are now the southern Mexican states of Vera Cruz and Tabasco.
Archaeological evidence indicates that these ancient Jaredite people, who according to the Book of Mormon lived on the Western Hemisphere from approximately 2500 B.C. to 420 A.D, over 2000-years.  
This over 2000-year time period, allow them to spread out over the land from at least as far south as Peru, traveling by boat along the west coast landing in Peru.  And as far north as into the United States.

Olmec statute.                                Found in Honduras.
Skeleton of a man of gigantic size.    Found in Wisconsin USA.  (New York Times, December 20, 1897)
A Giant's remains in a Mound.           Found in West Virginia USA.  (The New York Times, Nov 20, 1883)
Giants landed in Peru.
"There is a tradition that the giants, [the Jaredites], who are said to have landed at Point Santa Elena [Peru], forced the Caras to abandon the coast, and retire into the mountainous district around Quito"  (The Travels of Pedro de Cieza Leon, Page xlvii, 1535-1550 AD contained in the first part of his Chronicles of Peru,) 
"There are, however reports concerning giants, [the Jaredites], in Peru, who landed on the coast at the point of Santa Elena....  There arrived on the coast, in boats...as big as large ships..." (The Travels of Pedro de Cieza Leon, Pages 188-189)
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<<Olmec stone head. Dated: 800 BC to 600 AD 
(Book of Mormon/Jaredite time period)
Archaeological Museum, Jalapa, Mexico. (2006, World Book Multimedia Encyclopedia)   

Dated: 1200 BC to 900 BC >>
(Book of Mormon/Jaredite time period)

“Olmec Indians...developed what may have been the earliest civilization in the Americas.  The Olmec civilization flourished between about 1200 and 400 BC The most important centers of Olmec culture were on the Mexican Gulf Coast, in what are now the southern Mexican states of Vera Cruz and Tabasco.”    (World Book Multimedia Encyclopedia, 1998)
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"More than 1,500 years before the Maya flourished in Central America... the mysterious Olmec people were building the first great culture of Mesoamerica. Starting in 1200 BC in...Mexico's southern Gulf Coast, the Olmec's influence spread as far as modern Guatemala, Honduras, Belize, Costa Rica and El Salvador. They built large settlements, established elaborate trade routes...And then, about 300 BC, their civilization vanished."  (Times Magazine, June, 24 2001)
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Olmec Heads

 

 

 

 

 

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Vera Cruz and Chiapas “La Venta suffered the fate of San Lorenzo, having been destroyed by violence around 400 B.C. Olmec civilization subsequently disappeared or was transformed into one or more of the cultures of the southeastern lowlands.” (Encyclopedia Britannica 2003)    
Note: This "400 BC" date, agrees with the Book of Mormon recorded date of destruction.  (Ether 15:29 & (Omni 1:21)
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<<The partly excavated main structure of San José Mogote 1500 B.C to 500 B.C.
(Book of Mormon/Jaredite time period.)  

(Additional Info. on Jaredite Cities.) 

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 The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico  

 Bernal Diaz del Castillo wrote in Spanish, in the 1560’s, The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico.  It was published in the United States in 1908. 

 

 <<Bernal Castillo was one of the Spanish conquistadors with Hernandez Cortes when Cortes entered the Aztec nation of Montezuma in 1519 AD 
“This book is one of the main sources for the history of the Conquest.”  It was… [written] after the Conquest was over, at the time the author, [Bernal Castillo] then nearly sixty, was living in Santiago de Guatemala.  It is Bernal Castillo’s personal journal of his first-hand knowledge of that historical event.   (Introduction to The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico.)

Bernal Castillo records as follows:
"They said that their ancestors had told them, that in times past there had lived among them men and women of giant size with huge bones, and because they were very bad people of evil manners that they had fought with them and killed them, and those of them who remained died off.  So that we could see how huge and tall these people had been they brought us a leg bone of one of them which was very thick and the height of a man of ordinary stature, and that was the bone from the hip to the knee.  I measured myself against it and it was as tall as I am although I am of fair size  They brought other pieces of bone like the first but they were already eaten away and destroyed by the soil.  We were all amazed at seeing those bones and felt sure that there must have been giants in this country, and Our Captain Cortez said to us that it would be well to send that great bone to Castele so that His Majesty might see it, so we sent it with the first of our agents who went there."  (The History of the Conquest of New Spain p. 286) (Internet Archive)

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Articles in The New York Times. 
Published: May 4, 1908
"...a remarkable discovery found in Mexico a cave containing some 200 skeletons of men each above eight feet in height.  The cave was evidently the burial place of a race of giants who antedated, [pre-dated], the Aztecs...."  Giants' Skeletons  found in Mexico, New York Times, May 4, 1908)

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"All unanimously agree that giants existed and dwelt in various parts of this continent…they are descended from …families who united at the dispersion of Babel."   (Edward Kingsborough, Antiquities of Mexico, Vol. 8 p. 28)  

Note: “Even in the “...1840’s”... “Kingsborough’s works had not reached America.”
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 <<Diego de Landa, Catholic Bishop in the Yucatan recorded:
"…in this country, [Yucatan Peninsula] they [Maya Indians] discovered in a building"  [ancient] "buildings of Izamal", which they destroyed, a great urn with three handles…enclosing the ashes of a burned body with some arm and leg bones of marvelous size…. " [the Maya had no] "recollection of the builders".   "About twelve or thirteen years ago while digging a well in the pueblo of Tekanto…they found a grave in which the shin bone of a dead man was found which measured more than a vara… [33 inches]  And the natives believe that there were giants in this province on account of the graves which have been found in it."   (Landa's Relacion de las Cosas de Yucatan, p. 19)  

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"…there were some figures of stucco… giants armed with their shields and helmets…"  (Landa's Relacion de las Cosas de Yucatan, p. 172, Diego de Landa in 1572 A.D., was the first Catholic Bishop in the Yucatan,)
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 <<  Ixtlilxóchitl recorded:
"In this land called New Spain had giants, as it has been shown by the bones that have been discovered in many areas. …They were destroyed and their civilizations came to an end as a result of the great calamities as punishment from heaven for the serious sins they had committed." (Ixtlilxochitl: 25)

“On the banks of the Atoyac river, which is the on the passes between Pueblu and Cholula…they found some of the giants that had escaped the calamity and extermination…”    (Quote from the historian Ixtlilxochitl, Ancient America & the Book of Mormon, p. 136)
Obras históricas de don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl    Note:  The records of Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, were published to the world 30 years after the publication of the Book of Mormon. 

'The writings of Ixtlilxochitl tell of a group of people called Ulmecas and Xicalancas who settled among the first settlers, [Jaredites].  The new settlers, landed on the coast of Vera Cruz and migrated. The Ulmecas and Xicalancas were put under bondage by the first settlers, who were called giants or Quinametzin.'  (Obras históricas de don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl -"Giants")   (The Spanish word for Giants is Gigantes.)
"…men… twelve hands [10 feet tall ] in height…"   (Ixtlilxochitl, a native-born scholar of Mexico antiquities.)  

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<< Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora an ordained Catholic priest, (1645-1700)

During the 1680’s, Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, got access to Aztec and Toltec documents and wrote histories of Mexico giving us some interesting information about the original settlers of Mexico.
Gongorra said that he "arrived at the curiously definite results that the original settlers, [the Jaredites who], descended from Naphtuhim, son of Mizraim and grandson of Noah, who left Egypt for Mexico shortly after the confusion of the tongues." 
“Naphtuhim” is the plural form of "Nephet" which means honeycomb or honeycomb people or beekeepers, or people of desert. 
Note:  "and they did also carry with them desert, which, by interpretation, is honeybee; and thus they did carry with them swarms of bees."  (Ether 2:3)
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 (The History of the Indies of New Spain, P. 9)

 

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Joseph Smith received the same Urim and Thummim that the Jaredite Prophet, the brother of Jared, used.
 "…he also hath commanded that I should seal up the interpreters…."  (Ether 4:5 About 425 AD)  Note: (D. & C. 17:1)

 

 "…William [Smith] informed us that… the Urim and Thummim…were too wide for his eyes, as also for Joseph's, and must have been used by much larger men." (William Smith interview with J.W. Peterson and W.S. Pender, July 1891, published in Rod of Iron [Independence: Zion's Religion-Literary Society], [February 1924]: 6.)

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A letter from Professor Charles Anthon of New York, to E. D. Howe, Feb. 17, 1834.  
“Some years ago…a farmer [Martin Harris] called on me…requesting me to decipher, if possible the paper…” [A few copied reformed Egyptian characters copied by Joseph Smith off of The Book of Mormon plates onto a piece of paper]. “…he [Martin Harris] gave me the following account:  ‘A gold book…had been dug up in…the State of New York, and along with it an enormous pair of spectacles [the Urim & Thummim]. These spectacles were so large…” [Martin Harris said that whosoever] examined the plates through the glasses was enabled not only to read them, but fully to understand their meaning.”  (A Comprehensive History of the Church of Jesus Christ of L.D.S. by B.H. Roberts, p. 102-103)
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Joseph Smith received the same Urim and Thummim that the Jaredite Prophet the brother of Jared used.
  "…he also hath commanded that I should seal up the interpreters…."  (Ether 3:5) About 425 AD Note: (D. & C. 17:1) 
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 “And they did work in all manner of… iron… And they [the Jaredites], did work all manner of fine work.”   (Ether 10:23) 

 “…objects found at the [Olmec] sites include mirrors of polished iron ore…”   (2006 World Book Multimedia Encyclopedia)
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 << Pedro de Cieza de León
Pedro de Cieza de León recorded the following:
"This is what they say concerning these giants, and we believe the account because in this neighborhood they have found, and still find, enormous bones...."
"In the year 1550...Don Antonio de Mendosa was viceroy and governor of New Spain, they found certain bones of men who must have been even larger than these giants.  I have also heard that previously they discovered, in the most ancient tomb in the city of Mexico, or in some other part of that kingdom, certain bones of giants.  From all this we may gather that, as so many persons saw and affirmed these things, these giants really did exist."
"Acosta also mentions the bones of huge greatness, found about Manta, [Ecuador]."
(The travels of Pedro de Cieza de León, page 190-191, 1532-1550 A.D.)
 

 

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A picture of: "A group of natives in the Central highlands of Mexico, capturing and putting to death a giant."  (From Codex Vaticano A, vol. 8)  
Warning: The following picture-link contains disturbing ancient manuscript drawings.
 The death of a Giant.
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Giant Skeletons found in a cave at Lovelock, Nevada, USA. (The History Channel). (6:49 min.)

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