Posted by:
Heresy
(
)
Date: October 17, 2010 04:57PM
No idea if this is Mormon stuff:
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Golden_Plates#Non-LDS_plates_and_Mormon_apologetics"A six-page, 24-carat gold book, written in Etruscan, was found in Bulgaria;[75] and in 2005, an eight-page golden codex, allegedly from the Achaemenid period, was recovered from smugglers by the Iranian police. The Pyrgi Tablets (now at the National Etruscan Museum, Rome) are gold plates with a bilingual Phoenician-Etruscan text. Gold Laminae funerary texts similar to Books of the Dead have also been found in Italy. In the caves where the Dead Sea Scrolls had been found, archeologists later discovered the aptly-named Copper Scroll, two rolled sheets of copper that may describe locations where treasures of the Second Temple of Jerusalem may have been hidden. Another Israelite example is the tiny "Silver Scrolls" dated to the seventh century B.C.E. (First Temple period), containing just a few verses of scripture, perhaps the oldest extant passages of the Old Testament. Nevertheless, there is no known extant example of writing on metal plates longer than the eight-page Persian codex and no extant metal plates with writing from Egypt or from any ancient civilization in the Western Hemisphere."
The main obvious problems are that they are very short. By the time you wrote a whole book on plates and stacked them, the engraving on the bottom plates would be crushed. And they could hardly be hauled across the continent by Mormon, or out of the woods by JS.
And nothing like that has been found in any of the relevant civilizations.