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Check here this very interesting article.

The crushing defeat of Muslim forces at Tours in 732 was one of the first of a whole string of disasters for the followers of Mohammed. Chinese-led Uighur Turks had defeated the Arabs in 730 at Samarkand and again in 736 at Kashgar. At the same time (731-732), Khazar Turks invaded Arab lands through the Caucasus and got as far as Mesopotamia before being pushed back. And in spite of years of trying, the Muslim Arabs could make no more headway against the Eastern Roman Empire.

In a century, the Arabs had conquered the largest empire the world had ever seen. Now, internal stresses as well as external enemies had stopped the empire’s explosive growth.

In spite of what they professed—the brotherhood of all believers—the empire was an Arab, not a Muslim, empire. Arabs held the highest positions in both civil and military affairs. In the middle of the eighth century, descendants of Mohammed’s uncle, Abbas, led a revolt in Central Asia. Mainly ethnic Persians, the rebels overthrew the Omayyad Caliph, who claimed descent from Mohammed’s son-in-law, Omar. They founded a new, Abbasid, Caliphate.

In Spain and North Africa (west of Egypt), in the area known as el Maghrib (the West) the natives were also restless. The Libyan Desert separated el Maghrib from the rest of Dares Islam. The Muslims in el Maghrib, mostly African Berbers, had no more use for the Persians than they had for the Arabs. They didn’t recognize the Abbasid Caliph. Instead, various Berber chieftains ruled small sections of the countryside independently, while Arab leaders, who had settled in the cities, ruled city-states. Eventually the Berbers found another descendant of Omar and proclaimed a new Omayyad Caliphate. The Omayyads adopted the Spanish city of Cordoba as their capital.

The new Caliphs at first attempted to revive the holy war against the Christians in northern Spain, but soon found other things to interest them. Spain, long ruled by the Romans, was a more urban—and urbane—place than Africa. The Arabs had brought their own poetry to the country, along with the art and architecture they had picked up from the Persians, and the science and mathematics they learned from the Greeks, the Mesopotamians, and the Indians. The Visigoths had a literature of their own and had adopted the old culture of Rome. Under the Muslims, Christians and Jews had freedom to practice their religions and were able to engage in the learned professions. Many Jews came to Spain from less tolerant countries in northern Europe. Before long, Muslim Spain was a center of civilization, not only in Europe but in the whole Muslim world as well. Writing, painting, architecture, science, and philosophy flourished in Omayyad Spain.

In the other Spain, the tiny principalities of the North, there was less civilization and a good deal less religious tolerance, especially for Muslims who had stolen Christian land.

The other Spain

The Muslims had never conquered all of Spain. The northwest corner, Galicia, was inhabited by dour Celts (called Gallegos by the Spanish), who enjoyed dour Celtic weather. The climate in foggy, rainy Galicia, on the shore of the Bay of Biscay, would have seemed perfectly normal to any Irishman or Scotsman, but it was not inviting to the sun-baked sons of the desert. Just east of the dour Gallegos were the dourer Basques. The Basques spoke the same language their ancestors spoke in the Stone Age. They had defied any attempts to assimilate them by Gauls, Romans, Visigoths, and Franks. They were not going to let the Arabs and Berbers be the first to conquer them.

There has long been a notion in the non-Spanish world that Christians from France gradually pushed the Muslims back. The notion was probably started and spread by the Franks. Any reader of Cervantes’s masterpiece, Don Quixote, knows that Charlemagne and his Franks were never pure heroes to Spanish Christians. The Basques proved it by ambushing and wiping out the rear guard of Charlemagne’s army as it retreated through the pass at Roncevalles. East of the Basques were the incipient kingdoms of Castile and Aragon. And everywhere in that Christian fringe were dukes, counts, and other warlords in more castles than you can count.

For a long time, there was no organized reconquista. There was no organized anything in Christian Spain. The Spanish lords were not only jealous of each other, but they contributed to the fragmentation of Christian Spain by dividing their kingdoms up among their sons.

That situation might have resulted in further Muslim conquests if the Omyyad Caliphate itself had not quickly fragmented into Taifas, independent Berber tribal states. In 1031, a council of Taifa kings formally abolished the caliphate. There was a lot of raiding back and forth. Stealing from someone of the other religion was not considered a sin by either the Christians or the Muslims.

All warfare in Spain, however, was not Christians versus Muslims. Berber chiefs attacked by other Berber chiefs enlisted Christians to help them. Christian lords, in turn, had no qualms about seeking help from Muslims when facing Christian enemies. The great Spanish hero of this age was Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, known as el Cid Campeador. His title is instructive. “Cid” is a corruption of the Arabic “sidi,” meaning lord. “Campeador,” is champion, a tide Christians gave their heroes. A jealous Castilian king had exiled the Cid, so he offered his sword to the Muslims. He deserved his fame as a fighting man, triumphing on field after field. But nevertheless, the Christians were gradually pushing back the increasingly fragmented Muslims. In 1085, the Castilians took Toledo, the old Visigoth capital, now a major Taifa capital.

Then, the Taifa kings did something dangerous. They sought help from Africa, which lost them the services of the Cid. Even worse from their point of view, they lost their independence and the good life.

The Almoravids

The Maghrib, and a good part of West Africa south of the Sahara, was under the control of the Almoravids. While the Muslim rulers of Spain were sipping wine, watching dancing girls, and discussing philosophy, a Tuareg in the Sahara was getting religion. Tuaregs are Berber nomads, people whose hardscrabble life defies comparison. “Tuareg” is an Arabic name (singular: Targui). It means “the forsaken of God,” as “Berber,” which is Arabic from Greek, means “barbarian.” Tuaregs ran the caravans that crossed the desert. One of them, Yana ibn Omar, saw how different life in the Arab cities was from his own existence, in which a pool of clear water was an almost unimaginable luxury. The Muslims of his time, he concluded, were corrupting Islam. Luxury was turning them from God. To set things right, he led an army of Tuaregs against the west African oases, then against the cities of the north. He then founded a dynasty, called the Almoravids.

The Almoravids quickly conquered all the Maghrib and extended their dominion to the black empires of the Sudan. When the Spanish Muslims called on it, the Almoravid Empire was the most powerful Muslim state in the world.

These African puritans took one look at what life was like in Spain and saw that they had a double task: They must not only drive back the infidels, but they must reform their erring brethren as well. An Almoravid Spain had no attraction for the Cid, who went back to fight for the Christians. With him went thousands of Mozarabs, as Christians in the Muslim area were called, and Jews. Barbarians, like the Tuaregs, and later the Turks, had no idea why the Prophet made exceptions for the “people of the Book.” The Castilian king again exiled the Cid, but this time Rodrigo did not return to the Muslim lands. He raised a private army of both Christians and Muslims and carved out a kingdom for himself. For the rest of his life, he was King of Valencia.

When the Cid died, the Almoravids retook Valencia and quite a bit more. But the warriors from the Sahara quickly succumbed to the fleshpots of Al Andulus, as the Muslims called Spain. Once again the back-and-forth raiding resumed and, thanks to the emigration from Muslim Spain, Christian Spain gained manpower, civilization, and even an approach to unity. Reconquista was now a definite Christian aim.

The Almohades

Once again, a Muslim prophet appeared in the backwoods. This time it was Abu Mohammed ibn Tumari, a lamplighter’s son in the Atlas Mountains. He began preaching against luxury and soon converted a man who had a natural talent for military leadership, Abd el Mumin. Abd el Mumin raised an army and took over leadership of the movement. By 1149, he had made himself Emir of Morocco. He founded a new dynasty, the Almohades, and when he died in 1163, he was emperor of a larger territory than the Almoravids held. Apparently unable to learn from experience, once again, a Taifa king invited the African reformers to come to Spain and save his people. They came; they saw; they conquered. By 1172, they controlled all of Al Andulus, and their first order of business was to wipe out the licentiousness of their co-religionists. The Almohades did not succumb to the fleshpots. They kept their capital in the Atlas Mountains. But by 1195 they were ready to take on the infidels. The Almohades’ Emperor Ya’cub gathered an army of Islamic troops from all over Africa and Spain to march against Castile, the largest and most aggressive of the Christian Spanish states.

Alfonso the Lucky

At the time Castile was ruled by Alfonso VIII, nicknamed the Lucky. After his first meeting with Ya’cub’s army, he was lucky to be alive. The Muslims routed the Christians, and Alfonso made a humiliating peace with Ya’cub. He was lucky to be able to sign a peace treaty. One lucky break was that the old Almohade emperor knew he was dying and wanted to go back to his beloved mountains to die. The other was the result of an earlier stroke of luck, when Alfonso of Castile was able to marry his daughter to Alfonso of Aragon. The King of Aragon died near the time of the battle. His crown went to his son, Pedro II, grandson of Alfonso of Castile. Aragon, on the Mediterranean shore, was a relatively powerful Spanish state, and Pedro was famed as a knight-errant. Continuing the campaign against both Castile and Aragon would take more energy that old Ya’cub wanted to expend.

About this time, an idea originating in the Holy Land came to Spain. The military monks founded in Outremer, the Knights of St. John and the Knights Templars, inspired three orders of Spanish monks: the Knights of Calatrava, the Knights of Alcantara, and the Knights of St. James. Like their crusader counterparts, the Spanish orders were brave, disciplined, and very professional soldiers. Spain had not seen a disciplined military force since the Corps of Slaves, mameluks maintained by the Caliphs, had been disbanded.

Ya’cub finally died in 1199. His son, Mohammed al Nazir, never liked the peace with the Christians and he saw with apprehension that Castile was growing stronger. Alfonso, on his part, felt ready to challenge the Muslims again. He denounced the treaty, and Mohammed al Nazir declared a holy war. The Spanish Christians countered with a holy war of their own. The Archbishop of Toledo persuaded the Pope to declare a crusade against the Muslims in Spain. Both sides began recruiting wildly.

At that moment the Muslim world was relatively peaceful. Mohammed al Nazir was able to recruit unemployed soldiers from as far east as Persia and Turkestan and as far south as Nubia, on the upper Nile. Alfonso’s agents toured the courts of Europe and picked up a horde of knights and men at arms. Most of both armies were cavalry. The Christian strength, as always, was heavy cavalry—mailed horsemen expert with the lance and sword. Muslim strength was in light cavalry—horse archers and javelin men wearing less armor than their enemies but more mobile.

Sancho cuts the chain

Al Nazir’s plan was to draw his enemies away from their bases and confront them with a strong position they couldn’t break through. Soon, their supplies would run out. Logistics were not well developed in the Middle Ages. They’d have to retreat, which would mean they’d scatter, making them an easy prey for his agile horsemen. He fortified the passes of the Sierra Morena Mountains, a little north of the Guadalquivir River and Cordova, and waited. When Alfonso’s allies, his grandson, King Pedro of Aragon, and King Sancho the Strong of Navarre, saw the situation, they advised Alfonso to retreat, but Alfonso wanted to go on.

Then a shepherd appeared and showed the Christians an unguarded path around the passes. The knights made their way over the path and suddenly appeared on the heights above the Muslim army. Al Nazir’s main body was located on some small plains in the midst of hills, a geographical feature called “navas” in Spanish.

Mohammed al Nazir’s luring of the Christian army far away from its bases was a smart strategy, as was confronting it with the fortified passes, but keeping the bulk of his forces on the navas was not. The small plains didn’t provide enough room for his light horse to operate effectively. But the navas were perfect ground for the bone-crushing charges and hand-to-hand melees that were the Christians’ most effective tactics. Even so, the size of the Muslim army was so great the Christians spent two days in prayer before they even moved.

The Muslim army was a great mass. In the center was Mohammed al Nazir. The Emperor stood under a large parasol that served as a standard and behind a stockade of logs bound together with a chain. He held a sword in one hand and a Koran in the other. Around him on all sides was a bodyguard of picked troops. El Nazir was no Alexander the Great, riding at the head of his cavalry striking force. On the other hand, he was in the line of battle—a position no modern head of state or even commanding general would ever find himself in.

The Christian army was divided into the customary three “battles.” Alfonso commanded the center; Pedro of Aragon commanded the left; Sancho the Strong commanded the right. The Christians charged. It was their kind of battle: a wild, hand-to-hand brawl. But there were so many Muslims. It was the largest Muslim army ever seen in Europe, the largest Muslim army that would ever be seen in Europe for centuries hence. The wings commanded by Pedro and Sancho slowly pushed the Muslims into the rocky, wooded hills behind them, where they would lose all their mobility. But in the center, the Muslims, fighting under the eye of the Emperor, drove back the Christians. The Knights of Calatrava were almost wiped out.

“Archbishop, it is here that we ought to die!” Alfonso yelled to the Archbishop of Toledo as he rushed forward.

“No, sire, it is here that we should live and conquer,” the churchman replied. He pointed out that the Muslim horsemen had been stopped by Alfonso’s infantry spearmen, and the Knights of St. James were slashing into their flank.

Alfonso’s standard, following the King, pressed forward. The Muslims slowly fell back. But it was Sancho the Strong, not Alfonso, who reached the stockade first. Sancho demonstrated why he had his nickname. He chopped through the chain stockade and burst into Al Nazir’s bodyguard. The royal parasol, sheltering the Emperor from the sun, went down.

“Shah mat,” Persian chess players used to say, the origin of our “checkmate.” “The king is dead,” meaning the game is over. At the Navas of Tolosa, the game was over. The Muslim army panicked and tried to flee. Most of them didn’t get far. The slaughter was terrific. It almost wiped out the warrior aristocracy not only of Muslim Spain but also of North Africa. The losses hurt Egypt and Arabia and were felt as far as Central Asia.

On to America

The aftermath of such a horrendous battle seemed incongruous. The Christian army took a few towns and castles and went home. Pedro of Aragon was killed in battle the next year, Alfonso of Castile died a year later, and Christian Spain went back to its intra-communal feuding.

The Muslim threat was over. The Almohade Empire in both Spain and Africa began to fall apart immediately. It was extinct 50 years after the battle. The Muslim Taifa states paid tribute to the Christian kings. Most importantly, the Christians held the central plateau of Spain, containing the headwaters of all the Spanish rivers and the intersections of all the roads. Geography had always been a strong force against centralization in Spain. That obstacle was now removed.

The Muslim states slowly were wiped out until only Grenada, in the far south, remained. Less than three centuries after the fight on the Navas of Tolosa, Isabella of Castile married Ferdinand of Aragon, and Spanish unity was almost achieved. Ferdinand and Isabella then invaded Grenada and drove the last Muslim ruler out of Spain. That was in 1492. The Spanish then looked for new worlds to conquer. They found them across the Atlantic.

Source: War & Games

On this Sabath Day I would like to share with you the 178th Conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that took place last weekend in Salt Lake City, USA.

Since yesterday we have been following the 178th Conference of the Church. I love the Church and I know that it is the only true Church on Earth. It’s wonderful to be led by inspired leaders who love God and serve Him with all their heart, might, mind and strength!

By David Haldane, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

The Mormon Church has to be among the most outgoing on earth; in recent years its leaders have reached out to, among others, Latinos, Koreans, Catholics and Jews.

One of the most enthusiastic responses, however, has come from what some might consider a surprising source: U.S. Muslims.

“We are very aware of the history of Mormons as a group that was chastised in America,” says Maher Hathout, a senior advisor to the Muslim Public Affairs Council in Los Angeles. “They can be a good model for any group that feels alienated.”

Which perhaps explains an open-mosque day held last fall at the Islamic Center of Irvine. More than half the guests were Mormons.

“A Mormon living in an Islamic society would be very comfortable,” said Steve Young, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints attending the event.

The sentiment is echoed by Muslims. “When I go to a Mormon church I feel at ease,” said Haitham Bundakji, former chairman of the Islamic Society of Orange County. “When I heard the president [of LDS] speak a few years ago, if I’d closed my eyes I’d have thought he was an imam.”

Though the relationship has raised eyebrows and provided ammunition for critics of both religions, Mormons and Muslims have deepening ties in the United States.

What binds them has little to do with theology: Mormons venerate Jesus as interpreted by founder Joseph Smith, while Muslims view Muhammad as god’s prophet. Based on shared values and a sense of isolation from mainstream America, the connection was intensified by 9/11 and cemented by the Southeast Asia tsunami. It is especially evident in Southern California, with large Mormons and Muslim populations.

The Mormon Church has become the biggest contributor to Buena Park-based Islamic Relief, touted by its administrators as the West’s largest Muslim-based charity. Relief officials say the church has donated $20 million in goods and services since the 2004 tsunami, equal to about 20% of the charity’s annual budget.

Brigham Young University in Utah, the church’s major institution of higher learning, features what is thought to be one of the world’s best programs for translating classic Islamic works from Arabic to English. Though created primarily for academic purposes, the results have impressed Muslims flattered by the close attention.

“It shows they have a keen interest in the Muslim world,” said Levent Akbarut, a member of the Islamic Congregation of La Cañada-Flintridge.

And Mormons and Muslims say they often are co-hosts of educational and social programs at which, though some may be angling for long-term doctrinal influence, very little open proselytizing of each other seems to take place. “We have a very close and friendly relationship,” said Keith Atkinson, West Coast LDS spokesman.Mormons “explain our faith to anyone who will listen” and “treat Muslims like anybody else,” said Elder Dallin H. Oaks, a member of the Quorum of the 12 Apostles, one of the church’s top governing bodies in Salt Lake City. But Oaks added that “we don’t preach to people who would be disenfranchised” or likely offended by the effort.

Arnold H. Green, a history professor at BYU, has traced how early Mormons in the 19th century were hounded by accusations that church founder Smith was the American Muhammad. The first Mormons angrily denied any connection to the Muslim prophet but gradually accepted some comparisons, particularly that both religions were founded by post-Christian prophets with strong sectarian views. “As the church grew into a global faith,” Green wrote in a 2001 essay, “its posture toward Islam became . . . more positive” until, today, “the two faiths have become associated in several ways, including Mormonism’s being called the Islam of America.”

Both religions strongly emphasize family. They tend toward patriarchy, believing in feminine modesty, chastity and virtue. And although Islam discourages dancing involving both sexes, Mormons report that church-sponsored “modesty proms” commonly draw Islamic youths.

Both faiths adhere to religion-based health codes, including prohibitions against alcohol, but Mormons and Muslims share something more: membership in quickly growing minority religions that many other Americans have sometimes viewed with suspicion and scorn.

“We both come from traditions where there has been persecution in the past and continues to be prejudice,” said Steve Gilliland, LDS director of Muslim relations for Southern California. “That helps us Mormons identify with Muslims.”

A recent national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that although a thin majority of those polled expressed positive opinions of Muslims and Mormons, the number was significantly less than those favoring Roman Catholics or Jews.

More than half the respondents said they had little or no awareness of the precepts and practices of either faith. But 45% saw Islam as more likely than other religions to encourage violence, and 31% said that Mormons weren’t Christian.

Armand L. Mauss, a Mormon and professor emeritus of sociology at Washington State University specializing in religious movements, said that unlike mainstream Christians and Jews, Muslims and Mormons “tend to make fairly stringent demands for religious conformity on their members.” These practices, he said, include discouraging marriage outside the religion and observing dietary laws, such as the Mormon prohibition against tobacco, alcohol and caffeine.

But the clincher, according to Mauss, is that both communities “have been stung in recent years by the recurrence of scandals over which they have no control.” For Muslims, the obvious example is 9/11.

Introduction

David Stewart, Jr.

Archaeologists and historians generally agree that recorded history began between 3000 BC and 3500 BC.  This is remarkably consistent with the scriptural account.  It is significant that there are no written records, for instance, from 10,000 or 20,000 years B.C. that would provide a clear chain of recorded history that would falsify the scriptural timetable.

Any dates before this time cannot be documented by direct historical evidence.  Rather, dating of presumably earlier artifacts relies on indirect methods of calculation.  Such methods rely upon assumptions which are accepted dogmatically by the archaeology community, but are unproven.  For instance, carbon dating methods of very old objects depend on the assumption that the radiation level in the atmosphere has remained virtually unchanged throughout the entire existence of the earth.  Because the date calculation is logarithmic, even a small difference in carbon-14 levels can drastically alter the calculated date.  I have previously addressed some of the problems with DNA dating in the debate here.  The site requires free registration to view the discussion. Suffice it to say that we have good reason to believe geologic, DNA, and nuclear dating methods within the course of recorded history are relatively accurate.  However, calculations of dates in the remote prehistoric past bear a high margin of error and rely on numerous unproven assumptions that are typically not disclosed in public pronouncements by experts claiming their calculated dates to represent definitive fact.

Anthropologists and archaeologists claim that “As a species, Homo sapiens has not changed significantly either mentally or physically, for well over 100,000 years.  We may have moved from the Stone Age to the Internet Age but each human being is no different today to their forebear 500 generations in the past.”^[1]  They claim that only “after 100,000 years of what is assumed to be virtual stagnation, humans began a completely new way of life in what is known as the Neolithic Revolution.  It began approximately 12,000 years ago when people across the Middle East, Europe, and Asia quite suddenly abandoned their nomadic hunter-gatherer existence and began to opt for permanent settlements.  They began to cultivate rice, wheat, rye, peas, lentils, and other plants, and to domesticate animals such as cattle, sheep, pigs, and goats.  Technology also began around this time with the manufacture of pottery vessels for cooking and storing food, stone sickles, and grinding stones to turn grain to flower.”^[2]

Thoughtful persons should immediately recognize several serious problems with the claims of contemporary scholars.  We are told that the human brain has not changed significantly in over 100,000 years, yet that there was no cultivation of land and that humans lived exclusively a hunter-gatherer existence after 100,000 years of stagnation.  Humans are resourceful.  We have seen dramatic technological innovation in just the past ten years, and the course of recorded history demonstrates remarkable innovation even in the earliest antiquity.  Yet we are to believe that ancient humans – who shared the same brains and cognitive capacity that we do today – lived exclusively as hunter-gatherers for over 100,000 years, for over 20 times the length of entire recorded history, until the ideas of permanent settlements, crop cultivation, and the domestication of animals ever occurred to anyone?  Such a claim is patently ludicrous. It is made more ridiculous by the belief that permanent settlements – which allegedly had never been made over the prior 100,000 years – suddenly, independently, and near-simultaneously came into being all around the world.  Such implausible claims transcend the level of mere coincidence and invoke faith in consensus dogma far beyond reason.

The archaeological record is too sparse to credibly document the existence of prehistoric humans over the time frame claimed. The oldest sites of human habitation in North America, for instance, are dated at 12,000 years old – and even such dates depend on a string of assumptions that render the resulting calculations tenuous.  Worldwide, relatively few human finds that have been dated before 4,000 BC, and very few before 10,000 BC.  If Homo sapiens really inhabited the earth for more than 100,000 years before the beginning of recorded history, we would expect vastly greater quantities of findings of prehistoric humans.  Such findings have not been forthcoming. Anthropologists would have us believe that early humans existed for more than a hundred millennia, but for some reason, very few specimens been found.  Even the dating of these few often depends on circular reasoning rather than adequate scientific proof: settlements are claimed to be old because they are primitive, and recent if they are more advanced, enforcing the orthodoxy of the assumptions of Darwinian evolution by decree rather than the scientific method.

Dates claimed by archaeologists and anthropologists are also continually being revised.  Only a decade ago, it was claimed that the Americas were settled more than 30,000 years ago; now it is claimed that settlement occurred 10,000-15,000 years ago.  The pyramid of “Zoser” was previously claimed to have been built approximately 4000 BC.  Now, archaeologists claim that the pyramid was built in approximately 2600 B.C. Literally hundreds of similar examples could be cited. Dates characterized as impossible or absurd a few years ago are now taught as mainstream science.  In almost every case, the error has been in dating artifacts as being far older than they actually are. While these dates are still not correct, it is important to keep in mind that the direction of revision has consistently been in favor of a shorter scriptural timeframe rather than the “millions and millions of years” claimed by archaeologists.  It is likely – in fact, nearly certain — that in another hundred years, scientists will scoff at how primitive and erroneous the prehistoric timeline currently taught in textbooks turned out to be, and at the ignorance of present scholars for failing to adequately recognize or account for the unproven assumptions in their current paradigms.

Yet it is interesting that, no matter how frequently or how substantially the accepted dates of events and relics may change, there is rarely if ever any public admission of error on the part of the scholarly community.  Those who grew up hearing one set of dates proclaimed as irrefutable fact in school are often surprised to learn how drastically scholars have changed those dates in the course of few intervening years.  One would think that the frequent errors in dating requiring dramatic revision would lead so-called dating experts to be more cautious in qualifying their own claims and more respectful to those who hold different views, but such an approach is the rare exception rather than the rule.

Recent research has also demonstrated that the units of measurement used in so-called “Late Stone Age” and Neolithic communities around the world, from Egypt to Europe to the Middle East to India to Asia, were closely related^[3] and demonstrated precision to less than the width of a human hair.^[4] What is more, these measurements are closely related to natural constants including the speed of light,^[5] the circumference of the earth, and more.  Anthropologists and historians have no explanation for such astounding findings, which undermine core assumptions of steady Darwinian evolution from primitive to complex.

There is increasing support among linguists for the existence of a unifying “proto-language” from which all human languages arose, with a date of convergence estimated by qualified linguists at 15,000 BC.^[6]  We know that this date is still too early, but even this date wreaks havoc with the claims of anthropologists and archaeologists.  For a universal language to have existed around the world requires, at a minimum, contact among early peoples that academic consensus views on prehistory currently do not allow. In this point as well, scientific data supports scriptural history while disputing evolutionary views: human languages were not invented independently, but originated from a common source.

The purpose of this introduction is not to disparage those who accept the present dating consensus, but only to object to the all too common characterization that anyone who accepts scriptural chronologies at face value is ignorant or uninformed.  To the contrary, examination of prehistoric dates accepted by the scientific establishment demonstrates irreconcilable conflicts among different types of data, and ultimately invokes faith in evolutionary theory far beyond reason.  Whatever challenges or minor discrepancies scripture-based dates may face, such dates have generally corresponded closely to historical evidence in both the Old World and the New, and there are good reasons to believe that they are fairly accurate – especially when we compare them to the wildly fluctuating chronologies promulgated by the academic community over even the past fifty years.

The chronologies below deal exclusively with the history of the earth from the time of Adam and Eve down to the present, but do not address earlier issues of time.  The earth’s creation involved the organization of existing matter, and not creatio ex nihilo.  The elements – subatomic particles, not chemical elements – are eternal (D&C 93:33). Joseph Smith taught: “Anything created cannot be eternal; and earth, water, etc., had their existence in an elementary state, from eternity.”[7]  The state of organization the earth’s matter was in before the creation is not declared in scripture.  While there are scholarly reasons noted here that demonstrate that consensus prehistoric geologic dates are dubious and cannot be supported by rigid scientific standards, there is also nothing in claims that matter is “millions and millions” of years old that would fundamentally undermine scriptural chronology.  To the contrary, the recognition that matter is eternal leads us to believe that the building-blocks of the earth are very old indeed.

Book of Ancient Scripture

David Grant Stewart, Sr.

In this list I have listed the books which are listed in the Old Testament, but not present there, plus books which are not mentioned, but which I know exist and I have cited them accordingly. All of the earlier dates are entirely my own. For some of the later dates, about 1000 B.C. onward, I am indebted to the Bible Dictionary as published by the LDS church, which should be taken as approximately accurate until better information proves otherwise. I have made corrections to the extent possible with the time available to me.