The people who followed Jared and his brother took with them "all manner of that which was upon the face of the land, seeds of every kind" (Ether 2:3). According to Randall Spackman, the Jaredite inventory of seeds certainly would have included barley and onions, the staples of the Babylonian diet. Other plants represented could have been wheat, millet, rye, lentils, beans, garlic, turnips, peas, cucumbers, cabbage, lettuce, apples, pomegranates, figs, apricots, grapes, pears, plums, cress, cumin, coriander, and mustard. Nuts such as pistachios and almonds could have been gathered from the foothills. [Randall P. Spackman, The Jaredite Journey to America, p. 30, unpublished]
They Went with Their Flocks Fish Bees All Manner of That Which Was Upon the Face of the Land
In relating the account of the Jaredites, Moroni writes:
[They] went . . . with their flocks which they had gathered together, male and female, of every kind. and they did also lay snares and catch fowls of the air; and they did also prepare a vessel, in which they did carry with them the fish of the waters. And they did also carry with them deseret, which, by interpretation, is a honey bee; and thus they did carry with them swarms of bees, and all manner of that which was upon the face of the land . . . (Ether 2:1-3)
According to Hugh Nibley, it is a remarkable thing that the mention of flocks of any kind is conspicuously absent from the story of Lehi's exodus to the promised land. What an astonishing contrast from the story of the Jaredites! The one group hastening away from Jerusalem in secrecy to live a life of hunting and hiding in the desert and almost dying of starvation, and the other accepting volunteers, as it were, from all sides, moving out in a sort of massive front, driving innumerable beasts before them and carrying everything from libraries to hives of bees and tanks of fish! It would be hard to conceive of two more diametrically opposite types of migration, yet each fits perfectly with the customs and usages recorded throughout history for the part of the world to which the Book of Mormon assigns it.
But how could the Jaredites have carried all that stuff with them? The same way other Asiatics have always done--in wagons (see illustration). And such wagons! "Measuring once the breadth between the wheel ruts of one of their carts," William of Rubruck reports, "I found it to be twenty feet over . . . I counted twenty-two oxen in one team, drawing a house upon a cart . . . the axletree of the cart was of huge size, like the mast of a ship. "
It is generally agreed that ox-drawn vehicles were older than horse-drawn, but both go back to the fourth millennium B.C. [Hugh Nibley, The World of the Jaredites, pp. 187-189]