American Embassy, Beijing April 1993 Joseph L. Allen, PhD Orem, Utah Dear Dr. Allen: Was given a copy of your Exploring the Lands of the Book of Mormon for Christmas and have enjoyed reading it very much. My wife and I lived in Guatemala for three years while I was Counselor at the American Embassy and we travelled a good deal, getting to know Central America well. So we know at first hand most of what you wrote about from Teotihuacan to Izapa to Kaminaljuyu to Copan and Tikal. We know Ray Matheny and have visited with him both going to and coming from Mirador. We are pretty well persuaded by him that lake Atitlan is a good candidate for the Waters of Mormon. My purpose in writing is, while agreeing with you that the Jaredite culture is probably that known to archeology as the Olmec Civilization, to put forward a notion which does not seem to have occurred to you or any other writer on Book of Mormon archeology I am aware of. First, it is to be taken as historic fact that the Mulekites, or followers of Mulek, joined up with the remnants of Jaredites civilization soon after their arrival -- a hundred years or more before merging with the Nephites. As newcomers with few attributes of civilization (including no written records of their own), one can assume that the Mulekites adopted much of the residuum of Jaredite culture. And the Mulekite new comers outnumbering the Jaredite remnant, who had dwindled from continuous warfare, it can be assumed that the group soon came to be known by the name Mulekites , the name of the more numerous population, superseding the earlier name Jaredite. Second, there is nothing more common in linguistics than the inversion of vowels and consonants and "vocabulary drift" in which old words are displaced by new argot, the older vocabulary sometimes persisting in a secondary, or derived meaning (concepts perhaps related to your comments about "glottochronology"). Cf. English spirit : French esprit . Nuclear : common corruption nucular , and Greek Heracles vs. Latin Hercules. Thus with the merger of the two languages, Mulek may well have soon become Ulmec (Ulmecas -- later Olmec, Olmecas). It would appear that this corrupt form of Mulek has persisted for thirteen hundred years and more, and is to me a powerful argument for the authenticity of the Book of Mormon and one of the most compelling linguistic identities for which Book of Mormon students have been searching. Why no one else has made this observation previously I do not understand. The fact that what we call Olmec civilization reaches back a thousand years before the arrival of Mulek has no bearing on this argument. No one knows what the Jaredites called themselves. But by Book of Mormon times both the Jaredite/Mulekite remnant as well as the Nephite chroniclers identified them as Mulekites (Ulmecas) -- and so they have become known to archeology and history. By the way, Olmec stones are found as far south as La Democracia on the south (Pacific) Coast of Guatemala, which may be worth your visiting during a future trip to Atitlan (only about an 0hour and a half by car), giving evidence that Jaredite civilization extended considerably farther south than your book suggests. Sincerely,