Posted by:
RPackham
(
)
Date: June 05, 2012 03:41PM
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