Another Gold Book Found

In October 2005, police in Tehran, capital of Iran, recovered a number of artifacts that a farmer had found while plowing a field and then had sold to smugglers. Among the objects was a book consisting of eight gold sheets inscribed in cuneiform script, which was used in much of the ancient Near East. The sheets were bound by four small rings passing through holes in the sheets, in the same fashion as an ancient Etruscan gold book found in Bulgaria in 2003 (see "Etruscan Gold Book from 600 BC Discovered," Insights 23/5, 2003) and the plates of the Book of Mormon (described in History of the Church, 4:537). The book is from the Achaemenid period, which began in the mid-sixth century bc. One of its most prominent rulers was Cyrus the Great, who conquered the Babylonian Empire in 539 BC and allowed the Jews taken captive by the Babylonians to return home two years later. A fuller report of this interesting discovery will appear in a forthcoming issue of FARMS's Journal of Book of Mormon Studies.