For those of you who would like to know more about the Book of Mormon characters that Joseph copied from the plates, I highly recommend "The 'Caractors' Document: New Light on an Early Transcription of the Book of Mormon Characters," Mormon Historical Studies, vol. 14, No. 1 -- by Michael Hubbard MacKay, Gerrit J. Dirkmaat, and Robin Scott Jenson, who are recognized LDS scholars with years of study of and/or direct involvement with the Joseph Smith Papers.
Jerry GroverApril 4, 2019
The Caractors Document consists of primarily hieratic Egyptian, most glyphs fairly straightforward, with a minor amount of Demotic. The book Translation of the Caractors Document is available for free at various places on the internet.
Chad FranciscoApril 4, 2019
If the characters Martin Harris showed to Anthon were Egyptian hieroglyphs, it would not have been hard for Anthon to recognize them, even though Anthon was not an Egyptologist. According to Harris, Anthon said that "they were Egyptian, Chaldaic, Assyriac, and Arabic." This leads me to think that the characters were not classic Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Chad FranciscoApril 4, 2019
I love Meridian Magazine.
Question: How do we know that the "reformed Egyptian" was hieroglyphics?
Wikipedia reports that the BoM uses "reformed Egyptian" in only one verse, Mormon 9:32, which says that "the characters which are called among us the reformed Egyptian, [were] handed down and altered by us, according to our manner of speech" and that "none other people knoweth our language."[4]
...that the book was written in "reformed Egyptian" because that language took less space and was easier to engrave on gold plates than Hebrew, and that there was also an evolution of the Hebrew after the people left Jerusalem.[5]
LDS scholars note that other languages evolved from Egyptian through the centuries and have hypothesized that the term "reformed Egyptian" refers to a form of Egyptian writing similar to other modified Egyptian scripts such as hieratic, a priestly shorthand for hieroglyphics thousands of years old by the first millennium B.C., or early demotic, a derivative of hieratic, perhaps used in northern Egypt fifty years before the time that the Book of Mormon prophet-patriarch Lehi is said to have left Jerusalem for the Americas.[6--Hamblin, William J. (2007). "Reformed Egyptian" (PDF). FARMS Review. 19 (1). Retrieved 17 March 2017.
From the pictures I have seen hieratic glyphs look easier to write/engrave than hieroglyphs, and demotic script looks even easier and much quicker than hieratic glyphs.
So, how do we know that the "reformed Egyptian" was hieroglyphs?
Carl CoxApril 4, 2019
This is a nice overview of learning to decipher Hieroglyphs. However it has no relation to Joseph Smith and his translation of the Book of Mormon. Royal Skousen and his assignment of the Critical Text of the BoM discovered that the English translation was in Early Modern English of the 1400 and 1500 AD. The English we see in the current English Book of Mormon has been "corrected" to our current English. Another pertinent point is that the plates were never used in the translation - Joseph read what appeared on the Nephite Translators (called the Urim and Thummim in the D&C) or the seer stone. Those who witnessed the translation process were amazed that Joseph could correct Oliver's spelling of the unfamiliar Book of Mormon names without being able to see them while he was reading what was on the stone. He had the stone in the crown of his hat and the brim bent to exclude enough light that he could read the faint writing.
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Chad FranciscoApril 5, 2019
For those of you who would like to know more about the Book of Mormon characters that Joseph copied from the plates, I highly recommend "The 'Caractors' Document: New Light on an Early Transcription of the Book of Mormon Characters," Mormon Historical Studies, vol. 14, No. 1 -- by Michael Hubbard MacKay, Gerrit J. Dirkmaat, and Robin Scott Jenson, who are recognized LDS scholars with years of study of and/or direct involvement with the Joseph Smith Papers.
Jerry GroverApril 4, 2019
The Caractors Document consists of primarily hieratic Egyptian, most glyphs fairly straightforward, with a minor amount of Demotic. The book Translation of the Caractors Document is available for free at various places on the internet.
Chad FranciscoApril 4, 2019
If the characters Martin Harris showed to Anthon were Egyptian hieroglyphs, it would not have been hard for Anthon to recognize them, even though Anthon was not an Egyptologist. According to Harris, Anthon said that "they were Egyptian, Chaldaic, Assyriac, and Arabic." This leads me to think that the characters were not classic Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Chad FranciscoApril 4, 2019
I love Meridian Magazine. Question: How do we know that the "reformed Egyptian" was hieroglyphics? Wikipedia reports that the BoM uses "reformed Egyptian" in only one verse, Mormon 9:32, which says that "the characters which are called among us the reformed Egyptian, [were] handed down and altered by us, according to our manner of speech" and that "none other people knoweth our language."[4] ...that the book was written in "reformed Egyptian" because that language took less space and was easier to engrave on gold plates than Hebrew, and that there was also an evolution of the Hebrew after the people left Jerusalem.[5] LDS scholars note that other languages evolved from Egyptian through the centuries and have hypothesized that the term "reformed Egyptian" refers to a form of Egyptian writing similar to other modified Egyptian scripts such as hieratic, a priestly shorthand for hieroglyphics thousands of years old by the first millennium B.C., or early demotic, a derivative of hieratic, perhaps used in northern Egypt fifty years before the time that the Book of Mormon prophet-patriarch Lehi is said to have left Jerusalem for the Americas.[6--Hamblin, William J. (2007). "Reformed Egyptian" (PDF). FARMS Review. 19 (1). Retrieved 17 March 2017. From the pictures I have seen hieratic glyphs look easier to write/engrave than hieroglyphs, and demotic script looks even easier and much quicker than hieratic glyphs. So, how do we know that the "reformed Egyptian" was hieroglyphs?
Carl CoxApril 4, 2019
This is a nice overview of learning to decipher Hieroglyphs. However it has no relation to Joseph Smith and his translation of the Book of Mormon. Royal Skousen and his assignment of the Critical Text of the BoM discovered that the English translation was in Early Modern English of the 1400 and 1500 AD. The English we see in the current English Book of Mormon has been "corrected" to our current English. Another pertinent point is that the plates were never used in the translation - Joseph read what appeared on the Nephite Translators (called the Urim and Thummim in the D&C) or the seer stone. Those who witnessed the translation process were amazed that Joseph could correct Oliver's spelling of the unfamiliar Book of Mormon names without being able to see them while he was reading what was on the stone. He had the stone in the crown of his hat and the brim bent to exclude enough light that he could read the faint writing.
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