In his 1825 work titled View of the Hebrews, Ethan Smith wrote that Americans Indians did not have books and letters. Furthermore, Reverend Solomon Spaulding, whose novel Manuscript Story paralleled the recently published Book of Mormon, declared that an ancient American manuscript would be written in an elegant hand—with Roman letters and Latin language—on rolls of parchment. Joseph Smith’s claim that the Book of Mormon was engraved on metal plates in reformed Egyptian was a direct contradiction to these ideas. If Joseph had created the Book of Mormon narrative from his own knowledge, he surely would have conformed to the opinions of the religious scholars of his day. (See Echoes, 317–318).