Mormon lists the numbers of the dead. They are large numbers. There were certainly large numbers of Nephites, but ancient records often inflated numbers that could not be counted. With only twenty-four remaining Nephites, they surely did not count each fallen body. They had no science of estimates. What they did have, however, was military units. Thus, “Lamah had fallen with his ten thousand; and Gilgal had fallen with his ten thousand,” etc. These were military units that were of a proscribed number, but the reality could have been less than that number. Aztec military units consisted of eight thousand warriors. They used a base-20 counting system and, therefore, what we see as an unusual number was, for them, very similar to a base-10 count of ten thousand.
Mormon notes that only twenty-four survived. However, that was not the total number of survivors, for there were “a few who had deserted over unto the Lamanites.” That “few,” might have been a much larger number.
The importance of this level of destruction is to highlight that this was a different type of war. It was a war of annihilation, not of acquisition of territory. As previously noted, these are expensive types of wars, and there had to have been some force that made it worth the cost. Book of Mormon scholars assume that it was the trade route between Teotihuacan and the Maya kingdoms.