Critics have often pointed out that there is a suspicious link between the hill Cumorah and the angel Moroni, and the Comoros Islands off the eastern coast of Mozambique, the capital of which is Moroni, and has been since before the Book of Mormon. Defenders of the Book of Mormon claim that this is only a coincidence, and that 'Comoros' in fact has very little correspondence with 'Cumorah'. The fact of the matter is that prior to the French occupation of the late 1860's, Comoros was known by its Arabic name, Camora (sometimes also spelled Comora). It is thus more than a little suspicious to note that the 1830 Book of Mormon uniformly spells 'Cumorah' as 'Camorah'. See, for example, the original text of Moroni 6:2:
And I, Mormon, wrote an epistle unto the king of the Lamanites, and desired of him that he would grant unto us that we might gather together our people unto the land of Camorah, by the hill which was called Camorah, and there we would give them battle.
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Close-up of the map where Smith got the name Hill "Camora" from. |
As proof of the above assertion, we offer this section of an 1808 map of Africa.
This is part of the Mozambique channel. Madagascar is the island at the bottom right, and Mozambique is at the left. Roughly in the middle is Camora.
The full map can be downloaded from the University of Texas.
