Wednesday, January 24, 2024

Apologetic Logic

 “it is not valid to argue that something does not exist because it does not correspond to what we expect” - Dr. John Gee, Egyptologist

Click to enlarge images in this post.

The first possibility depicted in the above image is what some people expect and assume to be the case even though the character on the right does not match the character to the left of it. The second possibility is backed by actual evidence, which we see when the possibility is allowed to play out instead of being arbitrarily taken off the table. More on this later. 

The human mind is a funny thing. 

It can be quite narrow and stubborn, and can easily mistake its own assumptions and intuitions for reason and logic. 

We tend to discard possibilities based on how well they align with our expectations, and when we do so it can "feel" like we are being logical. But that's not logic. That's why I think it's important to steelman every possible apologetic and then attempt to logically deduce ruling it out, and if we can't logically deduce that the possibility can be ruled out, then it's important to leave it on the table and allow it to play out. That doesn't mean every possibility should be seen as true; it just means every possibility that can't be logically ruled out needs to be played out, as that's the only way we can see where it leads. 

Consider, for instance, the parable of Johnny.

Johnny was a clever boy, and pretty good at chess. His parents hired a chess master to give Johnny private lessons. One day, Johnny and his friend Alec thought of a fun prank to play on the chess coach. They set up a hidden camera so Alec could see the chess board from a different room and could input the position as he saw it on the board, to an advanced chess engine. Alec could then tell Johnny where to move, through a bluetooth earpiece. 

The boys thought the chess master would be very impressed by the moves. But it didn't go that way. 

"No, you don't want to move there, because I'll be able to take your bishop! Johnny, you need to look for potential threats before you make moves! Take that move back and try again." "No, no, don't do that. It will weaken your pawn structure!" "You missed an opportunity to develop your knight! Let's take that move back" etc. 

Johnny and Alec were both growing frustrated. But what they didn't realize is that the tutor was relying on pattern recognition, while the engine was playing out possibilities that humans would dismiss. 

And not only was the tutor relying on pattern recognition when it came to pieces on the board, but also when it came to Johnny himself, because the tutor did not expect Johnny to make moves that are beyond any human level. The tutor had limitations in his mind as to what moves Johnny was capable of making, so, for him, the possibility that Johnny's odd looking moves should be played out wasn't on the table. 

It's true we only have a certain amount of time and we can't personally play everything out. But rejecting something you have not played out, and campaigning for others to reject it too, is not logical (unless you literally use logic to rule it out through deduction, or identify and disclose premises which you personally believe are true and you demonstrate those premises are inherently in conflict with the possibility, and you openly state that this conflict is your reason for rejecting the possibility). 

What does playing it out mean? You get to play either side, but you have to leave it on the table so the other side can come back and respond. That's if you choose to play at all, which you don't have to. 

Let's illustrate. I hate to criticize the beloved onomasticon, but since individual Book of Mormon Onomasticon entries are relatively anonymous, and I want to keep this discussion about substance and not criticize individuals if I don't have to, I will use an onomasticon entry to demonstrate. 

Under cureloms, the onomasticon states, "Whatever fauna CURELOMS were..."

We can see here an assumption that cureloms were fauna rather than flora or something else. As well-meaning as that assumption might be, is it logical? No. It is not a logical deduction or assumption. The writer seems to be confusing their intuition with reason. This would be the case regardless of what credentials they have. 

The entry goes on to state, "three criteria affect their identification ... whatever etymology is proposed, it must meet these three criteria."

We can see the possibilities are further being pruned, without logical deduction being laid out to the reader. 

The three proposed criteria are as follows: "1) they were especially useful to the JAREDITES; 2) they were indigenous to JAREDITE America; and, 3) it must be assumed, Joseph Smith did not have an English translation for them or he would have rendered it in English."

So, it "must" be assumed Joseph Smith did not have an English translation? Are we to believe there are no other possible reasons why Joseph did not render it into English? The Lord's ways are higher than our ways. And we must also accept that they were without a doubt indigenous to Jaredite America? I mean, it seems likely, but does not appear to be a logical deduction. 

Admittedly, the first criteria does seem deducible from the text. So let's start there. 

And let's put flora on the table, allowing it to be played out. Different lines of possibility can be played out (like chess), but let's consider one with premises which don't seem extremely controversial. 

P1. An association between Jaredites and Olmec-related areas is plausible

P2. Premise 1 implies that the things which were especially useful to known Olmec area-related people would plausibly have been especially useful to the Jaredites

P3. We can identify some things which were especially useful to known Olmec area-related people

4.  Therefore, we can identify some things which plausibly were especially useful to the Jaredites 

Okay let's go down a secondary line within the main line and see where it leads. 

The word "Olmec" actually means something akin to "Rubber People." Rubber was something "especially useful" to Olmec-area-related people. 

As I understand it, people made rubber using latex from rubber trees. 

Therefore, rubber trees were especially useful, thus plausibly especially useful to the Jaredites. 

Another observation is that the verse which mentions cureloms repeats the wording "elephants and cureloms and cumoms," which may indicate that the three go together. Associating trees with elephants would make sense, since as they aged and no longer produced as much, they may have needed to be cleared. And elephants can be very useful for that.

Okay, it seems plausible that the word cureloms could therefore refer to a type of tree. Now, some have suggested Sumerian as a candidate Jaredite language. So, let's look at one possible Sumerian-based Jaredite construction for the word "curelom." I would propose the word "kirilam" as something the Jaredites may have crafted out of Sumerian words:

So, the assumption that cureloms were animals may "feel" logical, but in reality it mistakes biases and expectations for logic. 

Avoiding that mistake is something we can all work on.

-----

Okay, now I would like to address the image I placed at the top of this post. 

On one hand, the image shows a gradual change in the shape of the character, from the Hor papyrus to the W.W. Phelps Book of Abraham manuscript (although the image shows this happening in more or less reverse order). By tracing the character back to the Book of Breathings, we can identify the character and what it means. It is a determinative meaning "great," among a few other things that are really special about it. 

On the other hand, we see at the top of the image an alternate possible provenance for the character. Advocation of this alternate idea does not coincide with actual evidence, but does coincide with a timeline which is threatened by the evidence-based provenance. In other words, the order in which the Alphabet/GAEL/BOA documents were prepared is an issue, and the evidence of the evolution of the character from one document to the next conflicts with what some of our friends want to maintain was the order in which the documents were produced. 

Of course, both explanations should remain on the table and our friends can attempt to defend the alternate provenance, but, unfortunately, some of our friends try to shut down other explanations rather than allowing those explanations to play out. 

For instance, I shared a particular apologetic argument about 4 years ago, and it relies on the evolution provenance of the character shown in the image, as I was just talking about. Because my argument relies on that provenance, certain folks have simply taken the argument off the table as though it doesn't exist, because the argument threatens the timeline they maintain for Joseph Smith and his scribes creating the various documents. 

I am going to present that argument, in part, further below. 

Now, although our friends may reject the evidence-based explanation, the question remains of what type of reasoning would lead anyone to propose that Papyrus Louvre 3284 set of characters in the first place. And you might wonder what my response would be to their reasoning. That's perfectly fair. 

Basically, the oldest extant Book of Abraham manuscripts have characters drawn in the left margins, with the English text on the right. Those characters come primarily from a particular section of the Hor Book of Breathings. So, some have argued that Joseph Smith and/or his scribes believed those characters were the Egyptian text of the Book of Abraham and that was the reason those characters are lined up with the English text. If true, that would mean they got it wrong. 

In any event, the Phelps manuscript was produced separately from the others. And I don't believe the placement of characters in the left column on the Phelps manuscript was part of the same project in which unknown person(s) drew characters on other manuscripts. Even though the manuscripts all have characters in the margins. I believe Phelps added the characters to his margins, but someone else years later added characters to the other manuscript margins. Thus, the adding of characters to margins would be two separate projects. There are different ways this could have happened. For instance, William Smith may have done this when he was aligning himself with James Strang, or when he was travelling around trying to sell the mummies and papyri, drawing the characters as evidence attempting to make the papers and artifacts more appealing as the "source of the Book of Abraham." Also, a lot of these same characters from that section of the Book of Breathings were used to fill lacunae in Facsimile 2, which is significant because this likely means they were copied on a piece of paper for the printer to use and perhaps labeled something like "these are the characters for the Book of Abraham," which the printer would have understood (from in-person conversation) as telling him those were the characters to use to fill in the lacunae, but which someone years later may have misunderstood as meaning that those characters were the source of the Book of Abraham. And someone like William Smith, with access to these documents, may have added a few additional characters as well, in case anyone wondered what had once filled the torn areas of the papyrus. 

However, once again, some have assumed the Phelps margin characters were part of the same project as the other margin characters. That's the first assumption which leads some of our friends to turn to Papyrus Louvre 3284. There's a big lacunae in the Hor Book of Breathings which contains these characters, and Papyrus Louvre 3284 is a parallel text to the text of the Hor Book of Breathings, so it can tell us with some certainty which characters belong in the torn areas. If one believes Phelps was just copying from that section of the papyrus, and if one believes he copied a character which is now torn off and has thus become part of the lacunae, one could then surmise that the character he copied was actually the same as the next set of characters on Papyrus Louvre 3284. Even though the two bear no resemblance. 

That may have been hard to follow, but the jist of it is that they assume that what Phelps did with his characters in the margin was part of the same project as characters drawn in other manuscripts (which need not be the case, because the Phelps manuscript came first and is much more formal about the characters, which is consistent with someone else doing a copycat attempt at a future date), and they assume Phelps got his third character (out of three) from a spot which is now completely torn off from the papyrus, and they turn to a parallel text to determine what the next character would have been and they assume that was the character Phelps copied even though it bears no resemblance and they have no evidence that it was the character Phelps copied. The reality is that even if the characters were visible for Phelps on the Hor papyrus, there is no evidence that Phelps derived his character from those characters. 

What makes their claim even more curious is that our friends who advocate for the Papyrus Louvre 3284 possibility simultaneously propose that the characters in the margins were NOT copied strictly in order from the papyrus but that whoever drew them was jumping around and using characters out of sequence. So why would anyone insist that Phelps used this one character in sequence when it doesn't even match? Again, their reason is apparently an attempt to preserve the timeline of document production which is threatened by the evidence-based scenario, which is why they exclude the evidence-based scenario. 

.......................

Okay, now let's move on to my argument.   

Here is the Phelps manuscript: 


You will notice it has three characters in the margin, which I highlight in red below.

The first two characters are pinned to letters in the English text, which I highlight in blue:

To simplify things, let's focus on the characters and the letters in the English text which are pinned to characters:

Now, to simplify even further, let's transliterate the Egyptian characters so everything will be English:


Now, consider the fact that the first and second character are both used in transliterating the third character:

And the other letter which is needed is tagged:

If you are skimming or not paying attention, start to follow the significance of each detail here. 

There are a number of convergences which add up and support each other, which are about to be pointed out. 

iaw actually means "oldest official," which is a dominant theme in the Phelps manuscript, in reference to patriarchy:

And as I pointed out, the first two characters, plus the "a" which the Phelps manuscript associates with them, transliterate the third character. But it doesn't stop there. That third character also transliterates as wr, which means great, and is lined up right across from the word great!

Now, you might wonder, "what about the s?" I haven't forgotten that. If we put the s instead of the a between the iw, we get isw, which takes us to the same hieroglyph we would get if we put the a after the w rather than before it, i.e. "iwa" which means "inherit." 

Think about that. isw is the same hieroglyph as iwa. Both take us directly to the same hieroglyph. And that hieroglyph means "inherit," which is exactly what Abraham is talking about in his scripture.  

Now, what to make of the system of tagged numbers/letters? The "i" is tagged with a 1, which is consistent with it only occupying one position, as it does in all three transliterations. The "w" and "a" and tagged with a 2, consistent with them occupying two positions (they invert positions for iwa and iaw), and the "s" is tagged with a 1, consistent with the s only occupying one position, with no inverting. The Egyptian "i" is tagged to the English "i," perhaps to involve a more generic "i" than the reed leaf. Understanding it this way gives us iwa, iaw and isw. 

Study out the following image to understand how involved and amazing these convergences are.

And to top everything off, the iaw/wr character was taken from the name Osorwer, meaning “Osiris is great.” It’s the “great” part. Anyway, Osorwer was a High Priest and the father of Hor, and the one whom Hor inherited his Priesthood through in the Egyptian religion. So, a clear parallel with Abraham’s words in the Phelps manuscript, inheriting high priesthood down through fathers. This may have been what caught Joseph’s attention in the first place with the character. 

As you can see, the Phelps manuscript has very strong evidence of authentic Egyptian transliteration.  

Tuesday, December 5, 2023

Egyptian Alphabet: Initial Results Of Greek Influence Hypothesis

I would love to see some specific, thoughtful criticism. So far, the only negative responses people have raised to me about this project have been with a broad brush and seem to be based on assumptions they make due to the lack of trappings they would expect to see in a formal analysis. However, the evidence I'm gathering is informal and preliminary to any advanced academic undertaking which may or may not ultimately result, so the objections people have raised are not really apt. 

For instance, multiple people have said they dismiss my work because my transliterations aren't correct. However, these people fail to realize that Joseph Smith's Egyptian Alphabet misspells numerous words in English, so if we are to evaluate any potential Greek transliterating he may have been doing, we can't hold it to a higher standard than his English. That's why the results I return are from a wide net, although many people jump to the conclusion that a wide net equals cherry picking, which is just not the reality. 

People also assume that potential Joseph Smith Greek transliterations should be expected to perfectly match, rather than merely be associated with, the descriptions provided in the Egyptian Alphabet. However, that's their arbitrary preference and should not be projected onto Joseph Smith. For instance, if different descriptions were "mowing lawns," "looking at the sky" and "walking in winter," and the respective transliteration results came back as "green," "blue," and "white," common sense would tell us there's a likely association between the descriptions and the transliterations, but people who aren't able or willing to see beyond the surface will, with a broad brush, dismiss any association as imagined. 

Even without knowing exactly how Google Translate is glossing out its results, the results are still very useful. But people have to actually think. If the description is "Brigham Young," and there's a Google Translate result of "wagon," is that closer than a random word like "dog?" Yes of course. And that's the point of the evidence. If we consistently return results which are more closely related than random expectations, we can become quite confident that the results are not random. 

One of Joseph Smith's descriptions is about something "seen" underwater, and the Google Translate result came back as "see." Obviously that's positive evidence, even without knowing how Google Translate glossed it out. 

So it's a matter of evaluating each of the examples against a null hypothesis of random or, most often, no result at all. I have yet to see any serious engagement with the evidence, which will hopefully change. 

Moreover, the threshold that needs to be met is just plausibility. The whole controversy around Joseph Smith's Egyptian Alphabet has been about the assumption that it represents Joseph Smith's ability to translate regular Egyptian. But there's no proof that that's what Joseph Smith was even trying to do, and if it appears that other languages are involved (Reformed Egyptian, Greek, Hebrew, etc.) then the assumption grows weaker and the case against Joseph Smith becomes baseless.     

If you've read my initial post and the follow-up, you probably have some pretty good context for understanding the following data, including the limitations of this experiment until we can trace down exactly what glosses Google Translate is basing its results on. Although, if the results are ultimately confirmed, that could greatly change the lens through which we evaluate Joseph Smith's Egyptian Alphabet. 

This post will walk you through the results I have so far. I want to emphasize that we should not expect the names of every entry in the Egyptian Alphabet to yield a result here, because other languages than Greek and English might also be involved, and we are not testing for those. We don't know how many entries are intended to relate to Greek. It's a question of how much cumulative evidence points to some sort of Greek connection. There's a pattern of meaningful results, and each result strengthens that pattern. 

Also, it's possible that some of the Egyptian Alphabet entries are contractions which don't play out in the real world of linguistics but which involve real words and which play out for the Egyptian Alphabet's internal purposes, similar to how Joseph Smith combined the real word "more" with the real word "mon," even though one was modern English and one was Ancient Egyptian. In other words, the fact that he took liberties does not negate the fact that his claim about the ancient language is defensible, as I explained in a previous post

Now, a word is in order about my transliteration methodology. 

The testing process itself is not concerned with how Joseph Smith would have access to Greek. And it is not our job to correct Joseph Smith's methodology. The purpose of my methodology is not to fully identify and understand Joseph Smith's own methodology, but to cast a net large enough to capture any potential Greek transliterating Joseph Smith may have been doing, even if we don't understand all the nuances of his methods. 

For instance, we see the letter B at the start of the word Beth in the Egyptian Alphabet. It might be tempting to think, "well, in Greek B is represented with the digraph μπ, so that's how Joseph Smith would have transliterated it into Greek." However, that's only one possibility. 

Another possibility is that Joseph Smith intended the word Beth to refer to a single Greek letter, e.g. Beta. It's true that Beta has a V-sound in modern pronunciation, but we can't assume that Joseph intended it to sound like an English, rather than Greek, B. Similarly, when we see the letter P, such as in the second entry of the Egyptian Alphabet, "pha-e," we can't just assume it's supposed to sound like the English letter P, but it may be a trilled R like the Greek letter rho. 

Yet another possibility is that each letter in Beth corresponds with a single Greek letter, meaning that Beth would transliterate into four different Greek letters. 

Or, he could be going strictly by sound and it would be our job to piece together the small variety of ways the word "Beth" as it sounds in English could be transliterated into Greek, regardless of how many or how few letters are involved. 

And at least one other possibility exists, which is that Joseph Smith was using a combination of methods, and changing them as he felt like doing so, without instructing us. In the case of Beth for instance, Joseph Smith may have intended the letter B to directly represent the Greek letter Beta, while the E is supposed to be sounded out as the long-e of Upsilon (not Epsilon) and the last two letters of Beth, th, sound out together as Theta. And indeed this gives us the Beta-Upsilon-Theta transliteration which yields a very relevant English result in Google Translate. 

As one last note on my methodology for now, I want to stress that I'm not cherry-picking. The key here is that as I keep casting out the net, I'm not retrieving lots of other results and arbitrarily discarding them. Some, yes, but not many. Usually no English result materializes with any particular transliteration, and if a result in English does materialize, what pops up is something either relevant or inconsequential like the word "the." 

Alright, what follows are the results (see appendix, below, for Google Translate screenshots).

ah the first being who exercises Supreme power

The name here is ah. Ah is the sound of Alpha, the first letter of the Greek alphabet. The description, "the first being who exercises Supreme power," seems like a reference to Deity. Alpha is part of the title for God, "Alpha and Omega." Alpha also represents the first of anything, therefore matching the words of the description, "the first being." So, right off the bat we have reason to believe that Greek is involved, here. 

Ah-bra-oam. The father of many nations, a prince of peace, one who keeps the commandments of God, a patriarch, a rightful heir, a high priest

The name here is Ah-bra-oam. The whole description is about works, so it's fascinating that when I rendered it into Greek and entered it into Google Translate it gave the word "Works."

Ahnaios God without begining or end

The name here is Ahnaios. This might be confusing, because the Joseph Smith Papers website transcript has this as "Ahmeos," but they apparently made an error in this case. Looking at the word as written by Joseph Smith, it is clearly "Ahnaios," not "Ahmeos." The JSPP website also shows a word crossed out in the transcript here, where the actual document does not show a word crossed out. 

As we parse this out, it seems likely to be a contraction, because Joseph Smith has already associated "ah" with the description, "the first being who exercises Supreme power," indicating God, and this seems confirmed by the fact that Ahnaios starts with "ah," and the corresponding description associated with Ahnaios starts with "God." 

So if we break down "ah" and "naios" as two separate parts, what is the meaning for the naios part? I transliterated it and searched in Google Translate and the result came back, "Temple." There's plenty of room for a match here, considering the temple's extensive symbolism, and it's remarkable that such a relevant result would come back at all.

While keeping the result of "temple" in mind, consider how it relates to the next entry we will cover. 

Ebethcha the greatest place of hapiness where God resides the Celesstial Kingdom

The name here is Ebethcha. Here, it's talking about the absolute greatest place of happiness, and the Google Translate result is "Get in," which of course means to "enter." This is actually very significant because from a temple perspective the idea of the Celestial Kingdom, "where God resides," is symbolically depicted in a Celestial Room, and has very significant connotations with the invitation to "enter" (or "get in"). This match is actually very remarkable and substantive in meaning, despite the informal verbiage of the Google Translate result. 

Kah tou man the name of a royal family in female line

The name here is Kah tou man. I discuss this at length in a previous post, but the Google Translate result is "Mrs. Min." Like the Egyptian Alphabet entry, then, the Google Translate result is making a very specific female reference. Every woman referred to in that "female line" would be a "Mrs." The significance of this in the big picture is not stated, but the odds of Google Translate randomly returning such a specific result seem very low.

Iota the eye or to see or sight sometimes me myself

Iota tou-es Zip-Zip the land of Egypt first seen under <​water​>

Sue Eh ni what other person is that or who

These three consecutive entries in the Egyptian Alphabet go together, as pretty powerful evidence, as I explained and unpacked in a previous post. Even the simple fact that Iota is a Greek letter and Tau is a Greek letter is enough to lend plausibility to a Greek connection, but I would encourage you to read the analysis in the other post.  

ho-ee-oop young unmarried man a pri[n]ce

The name here is ho-ee-oop. The description gives us the distinction of "a prince," and the Google Translate result gives us "Your Honor." Now, I realize that one might be more inclined to think of a judge than a prince when hearing "your honor," however the exact conventions are not the primary issue here, since we don't know how Google Translate is glossing this out. The fact Google Translate returned a reference to honor/authority being held by an individual and that the description also references honor/authority being held by an individual seems quite significant.  

ho-ee oop hah Crown of a prince or King

The name here is ho-ee oop hah. This is similar to ho-ee-oop. But the Google Translate result is "The Hour." This is very interesting actually, as it brings to mind Christ repeatedly saying that his hour had not yet come, then at the Last Supper we are told "his hour had come" (John 13:1) and then Jesus prays, saying "Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you" (John 17:1). Glorify = crown, as Hebrews 2:9 tells us Jesus was "crowned with glory and honour" in the context of his death, i.e. Christ's death being the very symbolism of the Last Supper, in which Christ also declares the hour has come. So this is a context in which "Honor" (see my analysis of "ho-ee-oop," above), and "The Hour" and "Crown of a prince or King" all come together and make sense. 

<​Zi​> Virgen unmaried or the pri[n]ciple of vi[r]tue

The name here is Zi​. My rendering allows the Z to stand for the Greek letter zeta, and the i to stand for the Greek letter eta, in which case Google Translate gives the result, "she lives." That's very interesting when talking about a vigin and virtue, etc. Google Translate wasn't forced to return any result at all, but it returned something quite relevant. I discuss this entry at greater length in a previous post.

Zie oop hah An unmaried woman and a vi[r]gin pri[n]cess

The name here is Zie oop hah. The Joseph Smith Papers Project suggests the "Zie" may be "Zii," which I tried and got the Google Translate result "living well." This of course could describe a chaste and/or royal life, from the Egyptian Alphabet description, but I also suspect some wordplay here, based on John, chapter 4. The first little convergence I find interesting is the woman at Jacob's Well who declared to Jesus she had no husband (4:17), because the Egyptian Alphabet description says "an unmaried woman." Of course, she's not the virgin princess, but I'll get to that part in a moment. Jesus was talking with her at a well, discussing living waters, and Jesus promised the ability to give "a spring of water welling up to eternal life" (4:14, NIV), i.e. describing a "living well." The well where Jesus spoke to the woman was Jacob's Well, which converges with the "virgin princess" part, as Jacob's mother Rebecca is introduced to us in the Bible as a virgin at a well (i.e. "...when a virgin cometh forth to draw water..." Gen. 24:43) and Midrash identifies Rebecca's father, Bethuel, as a king (Numbers Rabbah 14:11), which would make her a princess, thus a virgin princess at the time of her introduction at the well, thus tying together the Egyptian Alphabet description of Zi (virgin, principle of virtue, etc.) with the Google Translate result for Zi (She lives) and the description of Zie oop hah (unmaried woman, virgin princess) and the Google Translate result for Zie oop hah (living well). 

Aleph in the begining with God the Son or <​first born​>

The name here is Aleph. Although Aleph is not a Greek letter, it is related to the Greek letter Alpha. Aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and has strong allusions to God in Judaism. 

In Chabad, the shape of the Aleph is symbolic of God and man's unity with God. The character associated with Aleph in the Egyptian Alphabet has the characteristics representing God and man's unity with God, matching the description given by Joseph Smith of being "with" God. See the slide, below. The original shape is thought to be derived from an Egyptian hieroglyph depicting an ox head. If Joseph Smith is showing a Nephite "Reformed Egyptian" version, they may have left off the bottom YUD. For more on the Reformed Egyptian connection to the Egyptian Alphabet, see Dr. Michael Hubbard Mackay's comparison between Reformed Egyptian characters and characters in the Egyptian Alphabet. For clarification and expansion of this argument, see the following slide:



I have only analyzed about half of the Egyptian Alphabet entries, most of which have yielded results. The last thing I want to do for now is just touch on some of the Beth entries.   

The Beth entries

Beth mans first residence frui[t]ful garden A great valy a place of hapiness 1 times  

This sounds like the Garden of Eden. The Garden of Eden had set boundaries and rules, it was a district. What if I told you that Google Translate returned the word "district" when I rendered Beth to Greek and entered it? 

Webster's 1828 dictionary says this about the word "district": "Properly, a limited extent of country; a circuit within which power, right or authority may be exercised, and to which it is restrained; a word applicable to any portion of land or country, or to any part of a city or town, which is defined by law or agreement."

Consider those words: "a limited extent of country ... within which power, right or authority may be exercised, and to which it is restrained..." The word "district" directly describes the Garden of Eden. 

The Egyptian Alphabet has a theme of being underwater ("beneath or under water," "the land of Egypt first seen under <​water​>") and some of the Beth translation results are very in line with that theme. 

There is "abyss," "deep," dive," "dry," and even "submarine" which literally means underwater. The fact that these are established themes within BOTH the document and the translation results indicates a level of convergence that really defies coincidence. Although this is pending verification of the Google Translate glosses, the fact that Google Translate would return these results at all is remarkable. 

Conclusion 

The results here are not what anyone would have likely expected. These results reinforce my hypothesis, although I'm hoping for well thought out critical feedback from readers. 

I'm very interested in hearing substantive appraisals of the evidence, including evidence-based alternate explanations anyone might have. 

Results, etc. (Appendix)














Monday, November 20, 2023

On Joseph Smith Being Right About "mon" Meaning Good, And The Egyptian Alphabet

I recently set out to test a potentially significant hypothesis, as introduced in my last post. Preliminary results are looking good for the hypothesis.

However, it looks like my last post was not easy for people to understand. 

To help orient the reader, I would like to provide a quick bit of background on the documents in question, and explain Joseph Smith being correct about the word "mon" as an example of how I think the documents work. 

For those who aren't familiar with the situation, Joseph Smith and his scribes created some Egyptian Alphabet documents but left us with no explanation as to what exactly they were. Scholars have dismissed the contents of these documents in the past as made-up words with no real meaning, and some scholars have pointed to them to claim Joseph Smith was a fraud. 

One of the documents is in Joseph Smith's handwriting, and may be the only one he was directly involved with. W.W. Phelps was very interested in languages and may have tried to extrapolate more than what Joseph Smith had told him.  

For a while, I have suspected the characters in the Egyptian documents are logograms, perhaps of Reformed Egyptian, and that the descriptions accompanying the characters constitute a list of connotations which the Nephites or someone else attached to those characters. 

This idea came to me while I was researching Joseph Smith's famous letter (penned by W.W. Phelps) which claims the word "Mormon" means "more good," if seen as a modern contraction between the English word "more" and the Egyptian word "mon," meaning "good." The letter places the Egyptian in the context of Nephite usage. So, I thought to myself, what if the Egyptian word "mon" (mn) has a meaning which the Nephites took and then added additional connotations to, so that when we see the literal meaning of the Egyptian word showing up in the Book of Mormon, it is accompanied by specific added connotations which match Joseph Smith's claim? 

In Egyptian, "mn" means to remain, endure, to be set in place, etc. (used in the word for monument, for example). 

This means we can potentially test Joseph Smith's claim. And when we do, it looks very good for Joseph Smith.

Because we know what "mn" means in Egyptian, we can find, within the text of the Book of Mormon, words which, on their face, match the Egyptian meaning of "mn." From there, we can identify the connotations Nephites attached to those words. 

Mosiah 5:15 equates being "steadfast and immovable" with "always abounding in good works." There we go. "steadfast and immovable" matches the literal definition of "mn," and the Nephites add to it connotations of "good." Paul also made this connection (in Greek), so the conceptual origin may have been in the Ancient Near East, before the Lehites left Jerusalem.  

Since "steadfast and immoveable" captures the meaning of the Egyptian "mn" (which is represented by the senet board hieroglyph), we can picture a Nephite Alphabet showing the senet board hieroglyph (or a modified version of it) accompanied by the description: "always abounding in good works." 

And thus Joseph Smith is vindicated. We can verify this by the fact that if we wanted to translate the Book of Mormon into ancient Egyptian, we could even use "mn" in Mosiah 5:15, using its actual Egyptological meaning, and it would also mean good. Joseph Smith had no personal way of knowing that, but it's a bullseye. 

So, that's how I suspect the alphabet works. The problem I've faced is that I hadn't accounted for the "names" which accompany the characters in Joseph Smith's Egyptian Alphabet. They seem mostly like strange made-up words. 

Here's where my new hypothesis comes in. I think it might be a phonetic alphabet, which references other languages. In some cases it has name for letters (like Iota and Tau), and in other cases it sounds them out or represents a foreign letter with a letter in the English alphabet.

For reasons stated in my previous post, I decided to use Greek to gloss out the letters and their meanings. 

I don't know Greek. And I don't think Greek is the only language involved here. And ancient Greek is not fully understood by scholars. But I'm just trying to see if some plausible results show up. Because then we could start looking into other languages and do a deep dive into the theory. 

I am using Google Translate, and it has been returning relevant, specific results which align with the descriptions in Joseph Smith's Egyptian Alphabet. 

The results are not likely to be found in a Greek dictionary, but that's irrelevant. Google Translate is casting a wide enough net to capture glosses (compensating for Joseph Smith's imperfect renderings) and return non-random matches. 

Of course, word association can lead to false positives. But random combinations of Greek letters rarely bring any results, let alone directly relevant results. Joseph Smith fares far better than random letter combinations.

When more than one Greek letter seems a plausible match for Joseph Smith's phonetic alphabet, I try each of them out. But that does not mean I could just keep trying until I got what I wanted. The key here is how rare it is for Google Translate to return any translated result. It is not as though it gives me lists of words to choose from.

I'm probably already confusing everyone, so let me show a really short example. 

Walkthrough: 

First, we look at an entry in the Egyptian Alphabet (the Alphabet document in Joseph Smith's own handwriting):

We can see that the entry has a character in the column on the left. Then it has the strange word, "Zi." Then it says, "Virgin unmarried or the principle of virtue." 

This brings to mind Mark 5:30: "And Jesus, immediately knowing in himself that virtue had gone out of him, turned him about in the press, and said, Who touched my clothes?" 

What does it mean that virtue had gone out of him? And that His virtue, in turn, healed the woman who touched his clothes? There is certainly an important principle here, the principle of virtue. A special healing power. 

Second, let's take a closer look at the strange word, "Zi."

We see two letters there. What if the Z stands for the Greek letter zeta, and the i stands for the Greek letter eta? If we combine the two letters, could that maybe spell something meaningful, according to Google Translate's net that it casts out?

Sure enough, we come back with an interesting result:

She lives. That sounds like the principle of virtue we were just discussing. What are the odds that it would come back with something relevant like that? It could have said anything, or most likely not given any translation at all, if it were random. 

Are you starting to get the idea of how this works?

Okay, now let's jump to something more advanced. The last, and probably most important entry in the Alphabet document is Ah-bra-oam. "The father of many nations, a prince of peace, one who keeps the commandments of God, a patriarch, a rightful heir, a high priest." 

The whole description is about works. So would it surprise you that when I rendered it into Greek and entered it into Google Translate it gave the word "Works?" 

Very interesting evidence.

Next, a lot of the entries involve the word "Beth." Let's look at Beth. 

The Alphabet says: "Beth mans first residence frui[t]ful garden A great valy a place of hapiness 1 times"

Sounds like the Garden of Eden, right? The Garden of Eden had set boundaries and rules, it was a district. What if I told you that Google Translate returned the word "district" when I rendered Beth to Greek and entered it? 

Webster's 1828 dictionary says this about the word "district": "Properly, a limited extent of country; a circuit within which power, right or authority may be exercised, and to which it is restrained; a word applicable to any portion of land or country, or to any part of a city or town, which is defined by law or agreement."

Consider those words: "a limited extent of country ... within which power, right or authority may be exercised, and to which it is restrained..." The word "district" directly describes the Garden of Eden. 

Now, after having read this post, you can go back and read the previous post and hopefully get more out of it. 

One final note for now. The Egyptian Alphabet entries are inter-connected in a way I haven't figured out yet. 

There is a theme of being underwater ("beneath or under water," "the land of Egypt first seen under <​water​>") in the Alphabet document, and some of the Beth translation results are very in line with that theme. 

There is "abyss," "deep," dive," "dry," and even "submarine" which literally means underwater. The fact that these are established themes within BOTH the document and the translation results indicates a level of convergence that really defies coincidence.







Wednesday, November 15, 2023

Joseph Smith's Egyptian Alphabet, Revisited!

 I had never put much stock in Henry Caswall or the "Greek Psalter" incident, in which Joseph Smith allegedly identified a Greek Psalter as a document relating to Reformed Egyptian. 

But what if, instead of an alleged scandal, we consider it a potential clue? After Greece conquered Egypt, the Greek language could be considered an Egyptian language. And, long before that, Greek letters had actually evolved from Egyptian hieroglyphs. And who knows what potential role Reformed Egyptian and Hebrew may have in this discussion. The Egyptian Alphabet could involve all of these, and more. 

As I was ruminating, I remembered that Joseph Smith's Egyptian Alphabet has a partial entry for Hah-dees, and Hades is a legitimate ancient Greek word. And the Egyptian Alphabet includes words like "Iota" and "Tau," which are letters of the Greek alphabet. And, moreover, the Book of Abraham itself changed a more Egyptian name as originally written in a manuscript, Zeptah, to a more Hellenized name, Egyptus. 

So, I decided to take a cursory look at the Egyptian Alphabet (there are three documents, but I'm only looking at the one in Joseph's handwriting - see note at bottom of this post), and look for references to the Greek letter Tau. 

The breakdown of the name Katumin in the Alphabet, as "Kah Tou man" seems to potentially reference the letter Tau. 

I substituted the letter Tau in place of the word "Tou," and rendered the name in Greek letters in Google Translate. The result is pretty interesting. The Kah Tou man entry in the Egyptian Alphabet says, "the name of a royal family in female line" and the Google Translate result actually came back as "Mrs. Min". 

Now, I don't know Greek. And I suspect Google Translate is performing some sort of gloss. But something made it return this result. Perhaps Joseph Smith is using an obscure Greek dictionary which Google is picking up on, I don't know. 

The word Mrs. refers to a female, which places our Kah Tou man in a female line, just as the entry says. You can try your own search with the letters: κα τ μιν 

The next few entries after that one center on men and women being married or unmarried, which is also directly relevant to the title "Mrs."

Now, what about it being a lineage? This becomes even more interesting. I noticed while perusing witness statements, on the Mormonr website, that an anonymous contributer to the New-York Tribune made an odd reference in 1841 to Joseph Smith mentioning "Daughters of Sharon." Said the source: "...he showed me the Egyptian mummies, of which he has four, i.e. the ancient Kings of Egypt, and the Daughters of Sharon, so it is revealed to him, he says..." So, among Joseph Smith's mummies was a Daughter or Daughters of Sharon? What is that supposed to mean? Well... Ta-Sherit-Min, the name of one of Joseph's mummies, translates through Greek to an English rendering, "Shenmins," which sounds a lot like "Sharon." And, guess what? It means "daughter of Min." So, we have a Mrs. Min and a daughter of Min, which makes a lineage. 

So, to reiterate, Joseph's anonymous guest, who wouldn't have understood the nuances of ancient Egyptian mythology or the Book of the Dead, left Joseph's company with an association formed in her mind between at least one female mummy and a name sounding similar to the ACTUAL name of the mummy, a name which literally means "daughter of Min," while the guest remembers "daughters of Sharon." Oh, and the reference to royalty? Well that's not literal but mythological (the funerary papyri declares the dead, including Ta-Sherit-Min, to be the King, Osiris), although we shouldn't expect Joseph's guests to have understood the difference. Nevertheless, in the context of the mythology discussed in the papyri, they are kings. 

Well, that was a very interesting start to things. 

Moving on, we find Tau again in "Iota Tau-es Zip Zi(p)." Using Iota and Tau as precedent, it seems likely that capitalized words are names for letters, while lower-case words are just letters. So this would give us Iota (I) Tau (T) es (es) Zip (Z) Zip (Z) or ITesZZ, i.e. ἰτησ ζζ

When we put that into Google Translate, we get the word "see." This is interesting for a couple reasons. The Alphabet entry for "Iota Tau-es Zip Zip" actually says "The land of Egypt first seen under water," so we get the word "see" as if it's being used in a sentence instead of being defined. But also, the entry right above it is for Iota, and it says "The eye or to see or sight sometimes me myself." 

So the Iota entry tells us Iota can be used in the context of seeing, and in the context of "Me, Myself." But what's interesting is the Alphabet then proceeds to use Iota as a dot in the next two entry characters, "Iota Tau-es Zip Zip" and "Sue Eh ni," using those entries to illustrate Iota in both of the two contexts mentioned in the Iota entry! 

We'll get to "Sue Eh ni" in a moment, but first let's get back to "Iota Tau-es Zip Zip," because the character that is drawn actually incorporates the letter Tau, but reversed. Tau is combined with the Iota dot. The name says "Iota Tau..." and actually gives us a character combining Iota and Tau (the Iota used in the Egyptian Alphabet is not the letter itself, but is a "jot," translated from Greek in Matthew 5:18, originally the Hebrew yodh).  

Okay, now the next entry, Sue (S) Eh (E) ni (ni) = SEni, ΣΕνι presents us with an upside-down Greek letter, Gamma, with the Iota dot on it, and an apparent question, i.e. "what other person is that or who." 

When I enter SEni in to translate, a coherent answer comes back: "You." 

Once again, I don't know what resulted in this gloss, and I don't know Greek. But there's a pattern developing of meaningful results, and each result strengthens that pattern. 

What are the odds that such a relevant, coherent answer would come back to such a specific question? Who are you, to you? To you, you are "me, myself." It's like a riddle. First it says "me, myself," then asks "what other person is that or who" and then answers "You." 

I wish I had more time to research, but I will continue slowly hacking away at the Book of Abraham from different angles. I would do this all day if I could. Hopefully more people will get involved in putting together the puzzle. 

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Note: We can't hold Joseph accountable for everything everyone around him does. For instance, I previously demonstrated that what happened in the Phelps manuscript was legitimate, but characters in the margins of other manuscripts appear to be some sort of copycat job, possibly by William Smith when he had the Egyptian materials and was trying to drum them up (since these are many of the same characters used to fill in lacunae in Facsimile 2, I suspect Joseph had copied characters for Reuben Hedlock, the engraver, and Joseph had labeled them something like, "use these to fill in the empty Abraham spots," and that piece of paper later ended up in the Egyptian and Abraham related materials, which could easily be mistaken as instructions for filling in what might appear to some as "missing" margin characters, resulting in the confusion surrounding the issue).