I was reading a bit of the essay on BoM translation with my wife. I started thinking about the characters that the BoM supposedly contained on the plates. Found some info online about copied characters (ones that Joseph reportedly copied from the plates) and researchers who found similar characters in other egyptian works. here's the link to the page I'm looking at:

http://www.shields-research.org/Scriptures/BoM/Anthon_Transcript-Crowley/1942_02-IE.PDF

I'm curious if anyone has checked out the sources for the characters that are "photographs from recognized egyptian works"?
They start on page 4 of the pdf.

Enlighten me with your knowledge and wisdom concerning what look like a bunch of made up symbols to me please =)

It’s all explained in the movie Stargate. I think some of the UFO debris found at Roswell contains Reformed Egyptian, but the gummint isn’t saying.

Have you ever tried to read various old manuscripts in supposedly latin script? You could easily connect this to Merovingian handwriting or 16th century swedish handwriting or Roman handwriting and probably ancient greek handwriting too. If you cherry pick how various letters look across several centuries and many different hands of manuscripts (with also various slips of the pen) you can easily cherry pick similarities with the nonsense characters scribbled on the anthon transcript. And still many of the supposed similar signs with demotic script didn't look very convincing.

And also, "chaldean" and "assyrian" aren't similar to egyptian at all since it's cunieform writing, which is a completely different way to write that requires special equipment, it creates a very special look that cannot be replicated with just ordinary pen and paper. That little detail alone debunks the entire episode they are trying to prove true here.

Ancient Egypt was a big fad in the 19th Century. All sorts of tombs and the like were being discovered, dug up, and there was a thriving trade in ancient artifacts. Consider that somebody sold JS a common funerary papyrus, which he "translated" as the Book of Abraham.

So it's possible that JS had been exposed to a certain number of authentic hieroglyphics and "reproduced" them as "evidence" of his translation abilities.

Hey Buff

Why would Jews coming out of Jerusalem record their lineage and history before the Babylonian exile in a language no one has heard of or seen?

Gatorman

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxJ7gKIymVo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UncZBWcIPL8

yah here are some answers that demonstrate how full of crap that Joseph Smith really was, no ability to read foreign/ ancient languages required !!!!

Your source is a SHIELDS reproduction of a 1942 Ensign article. Neither is remotely credible.

I have seen a lot of those charactors [sic] before. They adorned a tastelessly designed paperback version of the Book of Mormon used, I think, in the late 1960s or early 1970s.

I don't think you'll find a serious treatment of that full set of charactors [ditto] anywhere outside of Mormondom.

Lot's Wife Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Your source is a SHIELDS reproduction of a 1942
> Ensign article. Neither is remotely credible.
>
> I have seen a lot of those charactors before.
> They adorned a tastelessly designed paperback
> version of the Book of Mormon used, I think, in
> the late 1960s or early 1970s.
>
> I don't think you'll find a serious treatment of
> that full set of charactors anywhere outside of
> Mormondom.

I just had a thought. If the fine scholars at SHIELDS are so convinced that Crowley's interpretation of the symbols is correct, and they are all analogous to Egyptian glyphs, perhaps they would be so kind as to have a third party translate the page and put to rest any speculation as to its contents. That should be relatively simple if the glyphs are all as clearly Egyptian as Crowley makes them out to be, and once we apostates see a translation of a Book of Mormon passage, we will have no choice but to come back to the fold.

Come to think of it, why hasn't anyone attempted a translation since this was published in 1942? Nibley? Anyone? Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb.

Anziano Young Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I just had a thought. If the fine scholars at
> SHIELDS are so convinced that Crowley's
> interpretation of the symbols is correct, and they
> are all analogous to Egyptian glyphs, perhaps they
> would be so kind as to have a third party
> translate the page and put to rest any speculation
> as to its contents.

Well, somebody did:

http://bmslr.org/translation-of-the-caractors-document/

That page is, to paraphrase a comment of one of the Egyptian scholars talking about the BoA, "rambling nonsense."

"This paper was in fact a singular scrawl. It consisted of all kinds of crooked characters disposed in columns, and had evidently been prepared by some person who had before him at the time a book containing various alphabets. Greek and Hebrew letters, crosses and flourishes, Roman letters inverted or placed sideways, were arranged in perpendicular columns, and the whole ended in a rude delineation of a circle divided into various compartments, decked with various strange marks, and evidently copied after the Mexican Calender given by Humboldt, but copied in such a way as not to betray the source whence it was derived. I am thus particular as to the contents of the paper, inasmuch as I have frequently conversed with my friends of the subject, since the Mormonite excitement began, and well remember that the paper contained any thing else but "Egyptian Hieroglyphics.""

-Charles Anthon, letter to Eber D. Howe, February 17, 1834

"Geez, looking at all these Egyptian symbols is making me crazy and they are too hard to copy. This is just too much work. I'll never pull this off. Damn! Oh, wait a minute . . . I've got an idea!" ---Joseph the Smith.

The idea of "Reformed Egyptian" is actually very clever. The figures in the link look like a shopping list from the time turned on its side and then tweaked a bit. Turn your head ninety degrees and have a look. Shortcuts were one of Joe's strengths after all. Reformed Egyptian actually took ole Joe a long, long way. All the way to Carthage in fact!

The more you do anything the better you get at it. Scamming, Cheating, Lying. What is Reformed Egyptian other than a Red Herring, anyway? Maybe the best one ever.

If Mormons would look at facts more, maybe they'd get better at it? Nah.

Hey MB, OT here, but have you met yet with the SP?

Having done a considerable amount of research on the subject I have come to the conclusion that there is not, nor has ever been, a language known as "reformed Egyptian"

Having done considerable research on the subject I have come to the conclusion that there is not, nor ever has been a language known as reformed Egyptian

Reformed Egyptian - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSIVhO4Hhj8

regular Egyptian that is no longer on probation.

And now, some UNREFORMED Egyptian…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cv6tuzHUuuk

One of my guilty pleasures since 1986.

art and archaeology on the college level. I can tell you that one need not get very far into the subject without concluding that the papyri are exactly what experts know them to be, common Egyptian funeral texts.

Taking the matter any further is a futile, if not laughable endeavor.

notmonotloggedin

Why not just make this topic easy? It doesn't matter how they made this shit up. It's all fraudulant. End of story.