Item Detail
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29669
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3
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8
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English
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Cosmic Urban Symbolism in the Book of Mormon
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BYU Studies Quarterly
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Winter 1983
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23
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1
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Provo, UT
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Brigham Young University
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79-92
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The Book of Mormon's full significance cannot be reduced to early nineteenth- century American concerns. This article examines a basic aspect of the Book of Mormon which is viewed more adequately from the perspective of ancient civilizations rather than that of the American frontier.
Ancient world civilizations believed that the perceived order of territorial environment, in its "natural" and built-up features, revealed the structure of a sacred universe. The epitome of this symbolic order was a capital city or ceremonial center. "In those religions which held that human order was brought into being at the creation of the world there was a pervasive tendency to dramatize the cosmogony by constructing on earth a reduced version of the cosmos, usually in the form of a state capital." Characteristic of complex societies throughout the ancient world, this phenomenon is referred to as cosmic urban symbolism. The principles of cosmic urban symbolism account for many ideas and events in the Book of Mormon which are otherwise unexplained within a nineteenth-century American context.
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An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon
An Approach to the Book of Mormon
Lehi in the Desert; The World of the Jaredites; There Were Jaredites
No Man Knows My History : The Life of Joseph Smith, the Mormon Prophet
Reflections on Mormonism : Judaeo-Christian Parallels
The Book of Mormon and the American Revolution
The Burned-Over District : The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800-1850
The Dark Way to the Tree : Typological Unity in the Book of Mormon