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.

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).

The Restoration Theory

Where I left off in my last post on the subject, the reader may have felt a little overwhelmed by all the ideas and info. 

The Restoration Theory is an alternative to the Missing Roll and Catalyst theories. 

To simplify, I’m proposing that the Hor vignettes/facsimiles did not originate with Hor, and, moreover, they were originally drawn by Egyptian-Jews, for a non-funerary purpose. You might recognize the Jewish influence idea from the Semitic Adaptation Theory, although the Jewish role is a little different in my theory. I'm proposing the figures in the vignettes, despite being outwardly recognizable Egyptian characters, were used by the Egyptian-Jews to represent different characters. I'm proposing that their original purpose was to accompany the Book of Abraham (this is in Ptolemaic times), probably on a wall in the temple of Onias, and Joseph Smith was thus able to use the vignettes, which were physically on the papyrus, as a window through which he accessed the original text. Because he was penetrating something that was physically on the papyrus, this falls under the umbrella of translating the papyrus, making statements to that effect true. 

And I’m saying there’s actual evidence to support this theory. Because, we would expect/predict different things about the vignettes, based on what purpose they originally were intended to serve, and we can assess how well they align with expectations. 

By analogy, suppose a certain restaurant serves only  Mexican food, but a friend claims he used to get Greek food from there all the time. Is your friend lying? You come up with a theory that the restaurant originally served Greek food. You discover the owners are Greek, and the basement has Greek recipes, and old pictures on the wall show people eating what appears to be Greek food. All of that is evidence in favor of your theory. 

Okay, so how did the illustrations end up in Hor's Book of Breathings? Well, for one thing, Hor's "Book of Breathings Made By Isis" is the oldest known and possibly the very first of the "made by Isis" genre. So, if Hor invented the genre, he would have had liberty as well as an apparent desire for novelty, so we shouldn't be surprised to see him look for and find something unique and then adapt it to his purposes. 

The Restoration Theory is of course inspired by the Semitic Adaptation theory, but instead of proposing that a Jewish scribe took Egyptian funerary scenes and assigned new meaning to them, the Restoration Theory proposes that the scenes originally had Jewish meaning and Hor took them and assigned new meaning to them. This means we would expect the illustrations to be distinguishable from vignettes originally made for funerary papyri, rather than adapted for funerary use, which I’m proposing Hor did. 

Under this theory, we don't need to account for any characters Hor had his scribes write on the vignette for Facsimile 3. Joseph Smith is likely giving us what was originally written on the original version of the illustration. And part of the reason why the characters on Facsimile 3 are so illegible may be because Joseph Smith partly restored what was originally written, purposefully leaving hybrid characters, sort of like scratching out Hor's changes. Of course, if the illustration was originally a larger scene on a temple wall, a lot more could have been written and we wouldn't expect Joseph to be able to carry it over to a small papyrus version of the scene. 

This also means we don't need to reconcile why a Jewish redactor would append a Book of Abraham onto an Egyptian funerary text, since the vignettes themselves were the window into the text. 

This also means we can look at the witness statements through a new lens. For instance, Joseph Smith III said that the papyrus from which his father was said to have translated the Book of Abraham was found “with other portions” in a roll, singular. This seems to either suggest that multiple different documents bundled together can be considered a roll, or that on one single piece of papyrus there was both the content from which Joseph translated the Book of Abraham, and also unrelated content (i.e. the text of the Book of Breathings?).

This may also help us understand the reference to Abraham's own hand. In light of apocryphal stories of Abraham which had circulated anciently, when Joseph restored Abraham's original version it would be fair to make that distinction by pointing out that the version he is giving us is the one written by Abraham's own hand. Or, alternatively, if the Ptolemaic version was faithful to Abraham's original, or claimed to be, it would be fair to point that out by saying it is purporting to be the version written by Abraham's own hand. At no point did Joseph claim that Abraham had touched the papyrus (assumptions of others notwithstanding).

Now, let's take a look at some of the evidence.

As others have pointed out, although this is rarely talked about enough, Joseph Smith received the only lion couch scene in the world where the figure on the couch is in the prayer position. Early critics tried to say the top hand is a bird wing, but that has proven not to be true, as the dots are not dapple marks but are the remnants of finger lines after   ink flaked off. 

Unexpected presence of the goddess Bastet on Facsimile 3. This leads us right to Bubastis, and the Jewish temple of Onias. Claims that the printing plate shows that an Abubis snout was originally on the facsimile are misguided. The sharp cut and the area where lead was dug out are not in the shape of an Anubis snout. And I’ve demonstrated that the cut was made after that area was already cut lower than the printable portions. 

Unexpected Abraham in Egypt - the name Abraham is literally spelled out on the vignette. This is not like seeing things in the clouds where an unlimited number of shapes are possible, but these are actual distinct shapes representing Upper Egypt and the spelling, in order, of the name Abraham. 

Unexpected elaborate falcon on standard  this is not expected to be there, nevertheless the evidence is strong.