According to modern studies, the kind of society portrayed in the Book of Mormon is a historical reality. For hundreds of years, the world Homer described in his epic poetry was considered just a product of an author’s imagination. However, Robert Wood, an eighteenth-century English scholar, postulated that similarities existed between cultures in the Old Testament, in the Near East, and in Homer. Wood believed that a collection of these similarities would “prove that a ‘Heroic Age’ is a real and recurrent type in human society,” but he died before he could produce the work. In the 1930s, Milman Parry built upon Wood’s mostly forgotten ideas, showing that epic poetry can only be produced in and by a genuine epic milieu, or as Chadwick says, “a highly developed, complex, very peculiar but firmly established and very ancient cultural structure.” Hugh Nibley states that the book of Ether in the Book of Mormon obviously comes from an epic milieu and in fact reproduces it perfectly, though even scholars in Joseph Smith’s day had never heard of such a thing. (See Echoes, 454–456.)