History

IN presenting this Commentary on the Codex Perez to students of American Archaeology, the Peabody Museum adds another paper to its series relating to the study of the hieroglyphic writing of the ancient peoples of Mexico and Central America.

Joseph Smith was a fraud so says the Christian Church. Yet, many points of his Book of Mormon have historical relevance as modern science continues to uncover our hidden past, particularly in the Americas. How did a young man, from rural early America, come up with such details, and convert his goals to life-long research into the mysteries? His claims of an angel giving him this sacred treasure is no different than that of modern channelers or pentecostal tongue talkers who channel angels, God and Jesus.

Will not hell vomit forth its legions to applaud this last Spartacus, to contemplate in amazement this work of the Illuminizing Code?-Will not Satan exclaim, "Here then are men as I wished them. I drove them from Eden; Weishaupt has driven them to the forests. I taught them to offend their God; he has made them reject their God entirely.

IT is our design to present a pleasing and interesting miscellany, which will serve to beguile the leisure hour, and will at the same time couple instruction with amusement. We have used but little method in the arrangement: Choosing rather to furnish the reader with a rich profusion of narratives and anecdotes, all tending to illustrate the Female Character, to display its delicacy, its sweetness, its gentle or sometimes heroic virtues, its amiable weaknesses, and strange defects-than to attempt an accurate analysis of the hardest subject man ever attempted to master, viz-WOMAN.

The author's expertise and knowledge of the Sumerian language helped to hasten the early decoding of the Indus Valley seals.

In spite of the advances in our knowledge of Ancient Egypt which decipherment of many of the monuments of the old Pharaohs has made possible, two basic questions of the first magnitude still remain outstanding in as great uncertainty as in the days of Herodotus. These are the question of the Origin of the Civilization of the Country, and the question of the Dates of its Kings and Dynasties.

This work now recovers for us those epoch-making culture heroes who originated civilization, with their long-lost real names, personalities and authentic records of achievements and exploits, as truly historical kings of fixed dates, who have left us many of their actual contemporary inscribed monuments, along with full lists of their early kings and dynasties with their regnal years, extending continuously back to the rise of civilization; for they are disclosed as being already at that epoch a scientific people, accustomed to writing and calculation by calendar years and possessed of a keen historical sense.