The Land of First Inheritance was the region where Lehi and his family landed after sailing from the Old World, the site they reached and called the promised land (1 Nephi 18:23). It lay along the seashore on the west, in the place of the Lehites’ fathers’ first inheritance within the land of Nephi, west of the land of Zarahemla (Alma 22:28).
After Lehi’s death, contention among his sons led Nephi to take his followers and journey away into the wilderness for many days, where they settled what became the land of Nephi; the Lamanites remained in the original land (2 Nephi 5:7). The name was also applied more broadly to the southern lands that included the land of Nephi, the territory the Lamanites held as their fathers’ first inheritance.
The land figured in later conflict between the two peoples. In his reply to a letter from Captain Moroni, the Lamanite king Ammoron called it “the land of our first inheritance” and threatened to bring his armies against the Nephites to seek it (Alma 54:12-13).
Among the grievances Laman and Lemuel’s descendants carried against Nephi was that they had been wronged while in the land of their first inheritance, after crossing the sea (Mosiah 10:13). Zeniff, who led a Nephite expedition back to the Lamanite-held land of Nephi generations later, identified that land as “the land of our fathers’ first inheritance” (Mosiah 9:1).