Gramps,
Aren’t the copper tablets what your doctrine and promises are written on?
Hillman

Dear Hillman,
There are various plates and records associated with the people of the Book of Mormon, but none of them are on copper. The earliest civilization of which the Book of Mormon speaks is the Jaredite civilization. There was a colony of two major families and several families of their friends that lived together as a group at the time of the Tower of Babel. During the confounding of tongues at that time this group was spared, and continued to speak the Adamic language. They were led to the New World by the hand of the Lord, and their civilization lasted more than 1000 years, finally destroying itself in civil wars somewhat before 600 BC.
Subsequent explorers recorded in the Book of Mormon that they stumbled across vestiges of this civilization, including a record of their history. This history was written in the Adamic tongue on 24 plates of gold. Although the record was read and recorded by the Nephite people of the Book of Mormon, it has never been translated into English, but we are able to deduce that when translated into English its length will be approximately twice that of the Book of Mormon, which contains 531 pages. Thus 24 pages (plates) of the Adamic language would require, if translated into English, something over 1000 pages!! Of course the written Adamic language was not phonetic, but pictographic, and much more compressed than the Egyptian hieroglyphics. The compression ratio of English to Adamic is estimated to be of the order of 40 to 1!

The Nephite people (one of the two main civilization groups treated in the Book of Mormon, the other group being called the Lamanites) kept voluminous records written in books in the Hebrew language (Hel 3:15). However, they kept their sacred records, as did the Jaredites, on plates of gold, and these sacred records were inscribed with Egyptian hieroglyphics. Part of that record was translated into English by the young prophet, Joseph Smith, who declared that he translated it by the gift and power of God.
A third set of records treated in the Book of Mormon was called the Brass Plates of Laban. This record was the account kept by the Jews from the creation of the world, as we have in the Bible, down to the reign of King Zedekiah and the prophet Jeremiah, about 600 BC. This record on plates of brass was taken from Jerusalem by the family of Lehi, the progenitor of the Nephite and Lamanite nations, to the New World, and had about the same function among them as does the Holy Bible among us.
Gramps