For those who know what they're doing in religious studies, what is the significance of these papers just posted by the church? What is the cursive Egyptian symbols mean? Anyone know?

http://josephsmithpapers.org/paperSummary/book-of-abraham-excerpt-circa-october-1835-abraham-14%E2%80%9326

http://josephsmithpapers.org/paperSummary/egyptian-alphabet-circa-july%E2%80%93october-1835

This website seems to divulge so much that it actually puts the church in a bad light. Is it pro Mormon?

Yeah, its actually owned by the church I think, its their site where they are finally publishing historical documents. I think it'd be interesting to figure out what they couldn't figure out, like the cursive Egyptian stuff on the left margin. Joseph Smith is a liar and I wonder if those Egyptian symbols would match any of the other crazy crap he did in his days like Freemasonry, you know?

Significance. The LDS Church is accused of hiding it's history. They know the BOOK of ABRAHAM is a sham, and Joseph Smith invented his symbolic "languages," and "translations," and stories in the Book of Mormon, out of nothing, except some fictional novels, the Bible, theology of obscure churches, and Free-Masonry..

Tolkien invented fictional places on earth, fictional characters, language scripts and Alphabets for fantasy languages and peoples in the LORD of the RINGS series..

They publish all of Smith's papers, they cant be charged with hiding the papers and LDS history as much. They post the papers with no context, as in; it is what it is.

Mormons who are not readers or researchers, about the church, and or history, and or archeology, then lazily allow LDS apologists to explain the papers, and what they mean, in their specially filtered TBM hat stones.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/05/2012 03:04PM by delt1995.

To me, who knows nothing of Egyptian, or archeology, it looks like a rough draft for a fictional story someone is putting together.

I would be curious to know if there has ever been a handwriting analysis done on his writing style, and what the conclusions were.

The last symbol on the page is a backwards E. Means "pool of water" or "pool".

I studied this as something that would prove Joe was a true profit. The symbols (Egyptian Hieratic) rocketed me out of the Morg thanks to my 101 education in Egyptian. Big Joe laid out his version of the Egyptian alphabet in attempt to show the people of his flock (who were losing faith in him) that he was really a translator.

The "Egyptian Alphabet And Grammar" is, IMHO, the final nail in the Book of Abraham coffin. It consists of a left-hand column with Egyptian characters copied from the existing papyrus, with text from the BoA in the right-hand column, implying that the characters on the left were translated into the English text on the right. Of course the "translation" is NOT what the characters really say, according to Egyptologists.

But does that stop Mormon apologists? Of course not!

In the recent collection of apologist essays, edited by Robert Millet ("No Weapon Shall Prosper"), Brian Hauglid, an Egyptologist at BYU, says that obviously the text on the right was not meant to be a translation of the characters on the left, since they don't match (duh!). So we don't really know what the purpose of putting the characters there was. Perhaps it was one of the scribes just using the characters as a way of numbering the lines or marking off paragraphs. It needs more research.

See my review of "No Weapon" at http://packham.n4m.org/weapon.htm

Smith's "translations" were beyond bogus - they have proven to be highly fantastical. Smith chose to use the characters copied by Cowdery as prompts for multiple-word segments ranging from simple phrases to whole paragraphs. This is radically different from reality: individual hieroglyphs can represent single sounds or entire words, but not entire phrases.

The Egyptian writing on the papyri that Smith bought from Chandler were incomprehensible to even the most advanced scholars in the United States at that time, because though Champollion had deciphered hieroglyphics in France and published his findings as early as 1822 ("Lettre à M. Dacier relative à l'alphabet des hiéroglyphes phonétiques employés par les Égyptiens pour inscrire sur leurs monuments les titres, les noms et les surnoms de souverains grecs et romains"), his publications were not available in North America until well past the middle of the 19th century.

Neither, apparently, were the publications of Thomas Young, whose work, even if it had been available to Smith (highly doubtful) would not have proven useful enough for translation.

Academic study of Egyptology and hieroglyphics centered in France, Prussia, and England, in that order of intensity. While Egyptian artifacts had begun crossing the Atlantic and arriving in America as early as 1767, it appears that the topic held little interest for Amrican scholars until well past 1850.

Translations of the Rosetta Stone in English were first available in North America no earlier than 1858 (Report of the committee appointed by the Philomathean Society of the University of Pennsylvania to translate the inscription on the Rosetta stone. Philadelphia, 1858).

In short, Smith's fabrication of the Book of Abraham were born wholly out of his fertile imagination, and have no correspondence whatsoever to IRL Egyptology or linguistics. The pages you reference are therefore nothing but curiosities.

"The manuscript also contains nineteen Egyptian hieratic characters (a cursive form of hieroglyphics) in the left margins. These hieratic characters were taken from the papyri purchased from Chandler, but their exact significance and relationship to the text remains undetermined."

In other words, don't pay any attention to the man behind the curtain.

Thats the fact jack !

"Shag-reel"??

I'm just old enough to remember those grainy black & white shag reels they used to show at bachelor parties.

Heh-heh.