Where are the
Nephite Sea East and Sea West?
Another possible contraindication for
Sorenson’s geographic correlation is the relationship of that geography to
surrounding seas. Helaman 3:8 clearly mentions four seas: “And it came to ass
that they did multiply and spread, and did go forth form the land southward to
the land northward, and did spread insomuch that they began to cover the face
of the whole earth, from the sea south to the sea north, from the
sea west to the sea east.” Some Book of Mormon geographers
therefore insist on identifying four surrounding bodies of water. However, John
E. Clark notes of these seas:
I am convinced that the reference to a
north sea and a south sea is devoid of any concrete geographical content. All
specific references or allusions to the Book of Mormon seas are only to the
east and west seas. Any geography that tries to accommodate a north and south
sea, I think, it doomed to fail. But we cannot dismiss the reference to these
seas out of hand. If they are metaphorical, what was the metaphor?
[The accompanying figure] shows a
conceptualization of Nephite lands. The city of Zarahemla and the lands
immediately surrounding it were at the “center” (Helaman 1:24-27) or “heart”
Alma 60:19; Helaman 1:180 of the land. The surrounding lands, to the various
wildernesses, were considered quarters of the land. A Bountiful quarter (Alma
52:10, 13; 53:8; 58:25) and a Manti quarter (43;26; 56:1-2, 9; 58:30) are
mentioned. Moroni was another “part” of the land (Alma 59:6). We lack
information on the eastern quarter; my designation of “Melek” is merely my best
guess.
We have seen that the Nephites were
surrounded by wilderness on every side. And, conceptually, beyond each
wilderness lay a sea to the south, north, west, and east. Thus the land was
conceived as surrounded by seas or floating on one large sea. The land was
divided into a center and four quarters. Each quarter duplicated the others.
The quartering of the land was not the way most of us would do it, by making a
cross following the cardinal directions, but was a cross. . . . Such a
conception of the world would not be out of place in the Middle Easter at the
time of Lehi; and it is remarkably close to the Mesoamerican view of their
world. . . . The main point is that the references to north and south seas fits
nicely into the Mesoamerican scene as part of a metaphor for the whole earth
and was probably used in a metaphorical sense in the Book of Mormon. (John E.
Clark, “Revisiting ‘A key for evaluating Nephite Geographies,’” 41)
Clark’s proposal that the north and
south seas are metaphorical rather than physical finds an interesting parallel
in the use of the phrase “the other side of the sea” in various Maya documents.
Frauke Sachse and Allen J. Christenson notes that it is a metaphor that
“remains hitherto largely unrecognized because a presumed literalness obscured
its metaphorical interpretation.” (Frauke Sachse and Allen J. Christenson,
“Tulan and the Other Side of the Sea: Unraveling a Metaphorical Concept form
Colonial Guatemalan Highland Sources,” 1-2) They conclude by nothing that “the
phrase ‘the other side of the sea’ in the Colonial sources is only a metaphor
for a place of origin in the sense of creation and not departure, and thus does
not necessarily refer to an actual location that could be found on any map.” (Ibid.,
25-26) It is perhaps not coincidental that the metaphorical meaning that Clark
suggests for the sea north and sea south is also associated with a conceptual
organization of the world.
As Hopkins and Josserand worked
through the vocabulary terms used for east and west, they presented their
reconstruction of what Classic Maya terms might have been. For east and west
they reconstruct both the words and the plausible original meanings: “*’el-ab
k’in “the front porch of the house of the Sun (where the Sun exists)’, and
*’och-ib k’in “the door of the house of the Sun (where the Sun enters.”
(Hopkins and Josserand, “Directions and partitions,” 708The * at the beginning
of the word indicates that it is a reconstruction of an early form and is not
actually found in that form in the later data) They argue that these
proto-forms may be traced as early as 2000 B.C. (Ibid., 8)
In a world conceptually surrounded by
seas, the house of the sun would lie across the sea, or on “the other side of
the sea.” Thus Sachse and Christenson explain: “We understand that in the Maya
world view all creation involves the underlying concept of birth form a
primordial sea in darkness. The world came into being because the earth and the
mountains arose from the sea and the sky was lifted from the water. Creation
thus involves dawning.’” (Sachse and Christenson, “Tulan and the Other Side,”
2) The “other side of the sea” refers metaphorically to an origin in the
conceptual east sea, the place of dawning and creation. Thus there was a very
strong cultural preference for having a sea east and the parallel sea west. The
question is how that conceptual world might have been related to the physical
seas that the Book of Mormon text requires.
In contrast with the metaphorical
meanings for sea north and sea south, and the metaphorical meaning associated
with the east sea, the Book of Mormon text clearly supports the physical
presence of a sea east. Sorenson’s correlation has the expected sea east but
applies the designation to the Gulf of Mexico. Anyone examining a modern map
perceives the Gulf of Mexico to be north of the lands surrounding the Isthmus
of Tehuantepec. How can this body of water in the north be the sea east? In
Sorenson’s correlation, that is part of the skewing of directions. I suggest
that no skewing is necessary, only the application of the principles of
Mesoamerican directions.
The first important part of the
explanation is the Mesoamerican concept of the center. Any directions given in
the Book of Mormon necessarily related to some location that is conceptually
the center of the world for those who live there. Directions related to a
different center might result in different locations being placed in the
direction quadrants. We can see this same principle even in our modern directional
system. We may describe Denver as being east when we are located in Salt Lake
City, but in the west when we are located in St. Louis. What is in the west (or
west) depends upon the vantage point from which we view the direction. I
propose that the term “sea east” is a description rather than a name, and that
two different bodies of water might have been considered the sea east based
upon different center points from which they are described.
The original Nephite center point was
not Zarahemla, but rather the City of Nephi. In Sorenson’s correlation, we have
the highland valley of Guatemala as a plausible land of Nephi. From that
center, the east sea would be right where several Book of Mormon geographers
suggest—off the coast of Modern Belize. From that original center point, the
Nephites would then have had the option of calling the Pacific either the sea
west or sea south, since it creates the coastline that would be both south and
west of the land of Nephi. Because the definition of Mesoamerican direction
system had the sun setting in the sea west it is logical that they would have
selected that designation for what we know as the Pacific Ocean. The
interesting combination of the sea west being both west and south helps explain
Alma 53:22: “And now it came to pass that Helaman did march at the head of his
two thousand stripling soldiers, to the support of he people in the borders of
the land on the south by the west sea.” The land south of Zarahemla bordered
the west sea, not a south sea even though there was a coastline on the south.
While there is a reference to a sea
east from the land of Nephi, most references to the sea east come form the time
when directions were given in relation to the City of Bountiful, not the city
of Nephi or even the city of Zarahemla. (Nephi as the center: Alma 22:27.
Bountiful as the center: Alma 22:32-33; 27:22; 50:34; 52:13; Helaman 4:6-7.
There are two other references I am not listing because the east sea occurs in
a context that reads better as a metaphor for “the whole world”: Helaman 3:8;
11:20) Using Sorenson’s correlation, Bountiful would be located to the northern
side of the isthmus of Tehuantepec. With that location as the center point, the
Gulf of Mexico lies both on the north and on the east. Just as the cultural
necessity of the sun rising across a sea east and setting in the sea west
allowed the Nephites to define a sea west from the center point of the city of
Nephi, the same cultural preference would naturally select sea east as the
appropriate designation of that major body of water. No skewing of directions
is necessary to see the Gulf of Mexico as the sea east based on the perspective
of Bountiful as the center. Regardless of the body of water, the sea east
existed as a description that was related to the cosmological understanding of
the east as a place of creation and of the rising/birth of the sun. In the Book
of Mormon, it is plausible that two different bodies of water served that
function and were designated (not named) sea east to conform to the
cosmological principle. (Brant A. Gardner, Traditions of the Fathers: The
Book of Mormon as History [Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2015],
143-46)
Further Reading:
Margaret and Stephen Bunson on "Cardinal Points" in Ancient Mesoamerica
