Anticipating that many people would be present to hear his speech, he wrote his words and they were given to the people. Thanks to this unusual situation, we can be confident that Benjamin’s exact words have been preserved. Many copies existed. Benjamin’s words will be quoted by Nephite leaders and prophets for the next 125 years. Mormon and Moroni probably still studied it in school, as they were taught the demanding tasks of being archivists, scribes, abridgers, and prophets in their own right.
But what could Benjamin’s speech have been written on? The most common material that people in ancient America wrote on was bark, especially fig bark. It was pliable, and they would pound it flat and make really quite a durable writing substance like a heavy stock paper. We have only a few of these codices. One happens to be a big fold-out manuscript I saw on display in Dresden, Germany. There are only a few of these that have survived out of probably millions of Mayan texts that were in existence when the Spaniards came. They thought these were all pagan texts, and maybe they also made good fire kindling when it got cold, but they all went up in smoke. We can only imagine what we would know about those cultures had many more codices survived. The use of this writing material was standard operating procedure from the Incas in the south and up through Mesoamerica. These manuscripts were not easy to produce, but many were given out to preserve the memory of this singular occasion.