Nephite

According to the Book of Mormon, a religious text of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a Nephite ( /ˈniː.faɪt/) is a member of one of the four main groups of settlers of the ancient Americas. The other early settlers described in the Book of Mormon include the Lamanites, Jaredites and Mulekites. Some LDS scholars believe that the forebears of the Nephites settled somewhere in present-day Central America after departing Jerusalem. However, both the Smithsonian Institution and the National Geographic Society have issued statements that they have seen no evidence to support these claims in the Book of Mormon and furthermore, no secular archeologist or historian has supported their existence.

In the Book of Mormon, the Nephites are described as a group of people that descended from or were associated with Nephi, the son of the prophet Lehi who left Jerusalem at the urging of God c. 600 BC and traveled with his family to the Western Hemisphere, arriving in the present-day Americas c. 589 BC. The Nephites are further described as an initially righteous people, who eventually "had fallen into a state of unbelief and awful wickedness" and were destroyed by their brothers the Lamanites c. AD 385.