Has any Egyptologist (an expert at deciphering ancient Egyption picture-writing) ever tried to take the Book of Abraham, as produced by Joe Smith, and translate it back into the picture-writing?

I don't think they would bother to do it. They'd rather read the text in Egyptian - which they can and have done - and compare with Smith's version. The result: Smith's product is nowhere near the correct translation.

It would be great if they did it like on National Geographic and the Learning Channel.
Then the world could watch how the works come together side by side.


Mwahahahaaa

JoD3:360 Wrote:
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> It would be great if they did it like on National
> Geographic and the Learning Channel.
> Then the world could watch how the works come
> together side by side.
>
>
> Mwahahahaaa


I don't think the world cares. Only Mormons and Exmormons do.

why would they bother when there is already 'picture writing' in the BoA?

and guess what - those pictures don't mean what Joseph Smith said they do:

http://www.mormonthink.com/book-of-abraham-issues.htm#comparison

Those who can read ancient Egyptian do just that: they READ it (just the same way anyone would read English or Spanish or French or Japanese, ancient Greek, or Sanskrit).

It's the exact same "process."

Plus: there are MANY accurate and authoritative dictionaries, lexicons, etc. which contain all of the now-"common" words of ancient Egyptian.

There is NO question as to what an "ordinary funerary scroll" says--they were basically "mass marketed" over CENTURIES in ancient Egypt. Beyond royal families and extremely rich and well-connected families, throughout much of the history of ancient Egypt "ordinary" people worked and saved their ENTIRE LIFETIMES to buy "proper" funeral rites for their bodies after they were dead...and funeral scrolls (which all said basically the "same" things) were an important part of that multi-part process.

Think about how, when you obtain a mortgage to buy a house, etc. you get all those pages of "boilerplate" handed to you to sign. Hardly anyone ever reads those pages of tiny print before they affix their signatures to it, but ANYONE who reads English can read every word of it if they want to.

The "funeral scrolls" are similar: they were the "boilerplate" of getting your soul to the proper place after you died, so every "proper" ancient Egyptian gravesite, no matter how modest, contained at least one (I guess so that if any of the gods forgot a step, they could refer to the handy nearby funeral scroll to remind themselves how to proceed).

A funeral scroll...is a funeral scroll...is a funeral scroll...

There is no mystery to any of them. They are rote, after-death "boilerplate."

It's just that when Joseph Smith purchased the written ancient Egyptian papyrus material that he did, an event which happened in the very early days of ancient Egyptian translation, those who didn't know of the groundbreaking progress that was going on in Europe thought that the written ancient Egyptian language was indecipherable.

Not so even in the early 1800s (among those who had the education and knowledge to know better), and most emphatically not so now, in the twenty-first century.



Edited 5 time(s). Last edit at 09/12/2013 08:52PM by tevai.

I'm not completely sure, but my understanding of these funeral papyri is that they contained the secret/sacred rituals, gods' names, and incantations a soul needed to get past guardian spirits (or other such beings) to gain entry into the afterlife. Thus, they were not for the gods but rather the deceased. If so, then there is a minor but amusing similar paganism between tscc and the ancient Egyptians: each is a macgickal system in which moral righteousness counts less than knowing and executing the magickal process correctly.

Joseph Smith already did that, for part of the text. It's his "Egyptian Alpabet [sic] and Grammar" - it contains the Egyptian characters from the scroll, alongside the text of the Book of Abraham.

What more would you want?

Well...most papyri found with mummies are copies of or sections of the Book of the Dead (Book of Coming Forth by Day). There are some exceptions like the Edwin Smyth Papyrus which is the earliest known work on medicine.

Most of the fragments of the JS papyri are in hieratic, a cursive form of ancient Egyptian and not in hieroglyphs. I'm not aware of an online hieratic dictionary, but if you had a copy of BOA and wanted to play with it in hieroglyphs, just pull up Hieroglyphs.net. Type in a word and boom! Instant hieroglyphs. Please remember that you won't be able to read it as such--ancient Egyptian like a number of ancient languages (such as ancient Hebrew) didn't write in the vowel sounds, just the consonants. You were expected to know what the whole word was by context and, in some cases, by determinative signs at the end of the word. So "book", for example, will come up as "sfdw".

What does the recipe for funeral potatoes look like translated into hieroglyphics?

Chicken N. Backpacks Wrote:
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> What does the recipe for funeral potatoes look
> like translated into hieroglyphics?

:-)

I'd have to invent a glyph for potatoes.

I'd like that recipe in Reformed English or Egyptian please...

I've wondered that too, how the BoA looks if they translated it into Egyptian.

I looked at LDS.org and they don't seem to have much of anything in Egyptian.
http://www.lds.org/languages?lang=eng&langs=ceb,ces,dan,deu,eng,est,fin,fra,hat,hun,ind,isl,ita,jpn,kek,kor,lao,mlg,mon,nld,nor,por,rus,slk,spa,sqi,swe,tgl,tha,ton,ukr,vie,zho

But surely the BoM, being the most correct book on earth and all, has been translated to Egyptian. How about the BoA?

RG

Hoffman sold it to the GAs and they quickly locked it up in The Vault; which is their version of 'The Shelf'...