The Golden Plates
or, a Brief History of Writing Things Down
Once upon a time, humans did not write things down. If you wanted to season a saber-toothed jackalope from the tar pits the same way that bitch Ooga from the next cavern down did at the Neanderthal Cave Stomp and Potluck last week, you couldn't just steal her recipe box and take what you needed. You would have to either spy on Ooga, or trick her into giving you the recipe by getting her drunk. And getting her drunk was a dicey proposition because the recipe for sangria wasn't written down anywhere, either, and you might just end up murdering Ooga.
This state of affairs sort of worked in the short run, but even in the short run it had significant drawbacks. How was someone supposed to leave passive aggressive messages? Or record their victory over an aggressive cow for posterity? Or insult one another on the walls of public restrooms?
People definitely needed a way to make works both more permanent and more portable.
Then about 3,000 B.C.E., some guy or lady was probably sitting by the Euphrates River in Mesopotamia contemplating how to start a band with no real instruments to play because they hadn't been invented yet, and scrawled something to represent their feelings of frustration in the clay-like riverbank mud, and BOOM! Just like that, writing was born.
Mesopotamian writing of some sort, presumably.
Since I have no actual idea what this is, I’m just gonna claim this is ancient Mesopotamian erotica.
The Mesopotamians figured out that if they carved things into clay tablets, they could preserve that information almost indefinitely. This was an innovation even more significant than the creation of Microsoft Windows, especially Windows Vista, may it be eternally shamed and be buried beneath the sands of time.
Now, if your husband Derek cheated on you, you could have the satisfaction of knowing that 400 years from now, your great-great-great-great-granchildren could still read about what a complete dipshit Derek was.
About 500 years after that, around 2,500 B.C.E, the new upstart civilization of the Egyptians thought they could improve on the clay tablet operation. The tablets were fine, but they were big and bulky and wouldn't fit in your pocket or your bra and just forget about passing secret notes in class. So the Egyptians invented papyrus.
Papyrus had clay tablets beat all to shit in a number of ways. First off - no carving. Scribes would no longer have to worry about making sure that they had an extra pocket chisel on hand in case their first chisel broke. Also papyrus was much thinner and lighter than the clay tablets, and thus easier to carry. Importantly, you could also do FULL COLOR ILLUSTRATIONS, something the clay tablet interface glaringly lacked.
All in all, papyrus was a superior operating systems, so it caught on like a wildfire consuming a petroleum-processing plant. Before you knew it, people were writing all sorts of things down. Numbers, for example, to track crop yields or tally your lovers.
But they also invented symbols you could string together to make words, and then they wrote some of those words on papyrus, and just like that, self-absorbed men who were "trying to focus on my art right now" had a way to torment centuries of women by sending them bad poetry.
(Sadly, history does not record the name or reaction of the first woman to receive some guy's poetic attempt to win her heart. Still, I feel confident in speculating that at some point in that poem, the poet tried to rhyme something with the word "boobs.")
Papyrus, as awesome as it was in comparison to clay tablets, was not the last word in writing things down. For starters, the Chinese were engraving things on bones and occasionally on bronze; some people in the Arabic world went super hardcore and carved things into rock.
But the next BIG leap in terms of writing surfaces happened when the Greeks and Romans discovered that they could make something they called parchment from animal skins. People lost their absolute minds with excitement. Parchment was lightweight and durable, held ink better, and didn't decay as quickly as papyrus.
Several centuries after the parchment excitement, the Chinese invented paper. This was such a baller move that we continue to use it today, even though everybody has a smart phone.
So, to recap, here are the writing surfaces utilized from the beginning of human history to the time of Joseph Smith:
Clay tablets
Papyrus
Bones
Bronze
Rock
Parchment
Paper
Perhaps you'll notice the same thing that I did as you reflect on this list.
Never in human history has any civilization thought, "You know what would be an absolutely amazing surface to write things down on? Gold."
There are a few reasons why gold is a fucking stupid thing to write on.
It's pretty damn hard to get your hands on. Even if you'd decided that some sort of metal was the only acceptable writing surface, there are shit tons of other kinds of metal that are easier to find. Aluminum, for example. Tin. Copper, even, and that's rare as shit. But no, generations of Book of Mormon characters were like, "Nope, it's gold or nothing" and I guess just kept moving around refusing to write things down until they found a fresh stash they could smelt down to semi-usable form.
Gold is VERY attractive to steal - see above note on its scarcity. I don't believe for a minute that nobody in 300 B.C.E. nudged their buddy and said, "Hey, Alma over there is writing on a stack of fuckin GOLD. Let's steal it and buy a sweet mansion and get some hookers and blow." Seriously. There is a zero percent chance that nobody walked off with at least a page or two of gold as their retirement plan.
Gold is notoriously shitty to carve. It's a soft metal, which makes it very susceptible to scratches or dings in the engraving process. Want to carve instead of engrave? That's not going to save you either time or heartache. You have to lay out the pattern you're engraving first, and create tracking punches. Then you gradually add contour to each letter by drilling and piercing. It's brutal work. For a text like The Book of Mormon, which was so unconcerned with word economy that the phrase "And it came to pass" is used 1,430 times, accounting for more than 2% of the total book, this would have been a) torture, and b) the only thing you'd be able to do with your entire life.
Gold is fuckin HEAVY. The lowest weight even the Mormon apologists could credibly claim for The Book of Mormon, assuming that the gold alloy was impure, is around 50 pounds. This is almost the exact weight of my husband's Bowflex weight set. I would do murder if I had to carry that weight with me everywhere. It's more likely that the plates, if they had actually existed, weighed between 100 and 200 pounds. Now, seriously - do you see anybody willing to go to the effort of keeping a personal religious journal if they couldn't even haul it around in a backpack?
I've given some thought to megalomaniacal leaders of the past - Ramses II, for example, or Caesar Augustus, or Alexander the Great, or Louis XIV of France. These were guys who were madly in love with themselves, and even THEY apparently thought that a solid gold notebook recording their brilliance wasn't worth the hassle. The fact that we have zero golden plates declaring, "Nero is the greatest Emperor EVER" is pretty decent proof that carving on gold as a record-keeping method is just . . . stupid.
Here is an incomplete list of shit that would have been easier to write on and transport - shit that the dramatis personae of The Book of Mormon would have had access to at the time, assuming those people were real:
Papyrus
Parchment
Wood slabs, which could be coated with resin to preserve them
Animal skins
Aluminum
Iron
Zinc
Copper
Steel
Your old clothes
Clay
Yourself (think tattoos. That guy in that one movie who lost his memory did it. It may be hard but there's no way it's harder than carving sentences into GOLD)
*
Which brings us to the current dilemma.
Joseph Smith claimed that The Book of Mormon was "the most correct of any book on earth." The scribes who recorded scriptures on it thousands of years ago were the most select of Heavenly Father's Chosen.
Let's assume for a moment that these people actually existed and they actually wrote stuff down on golden plates.
The fact that they decided to write on an objectively terrible surface like gold, even though there were a LOT of other options, means that they were very, very stupid.
And if they were wrong about something as basic as, "What's a good writing surface?", there is no end to the other things they potentially got wrong.
