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).
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