Part 16: CES Letter Book of Abraham Questions [Section G]

by Sarah Allen

Facsimile 3, like Facsimile 1, is difficult to classify because it doesn’t have the standard features that it should if it was a “common” scene “discovered elsewhere in Egypt.” Once again, also just like Facsimile 1, there are accusations of the facsimile being “altered” and “wrong”. As Quentin Barney explains:

The assumption that parts of Facsimile No. 3 had been “changed” or “badly drawn” was held by the majority of individuals quoted in [Franklin] Spalding’s work. Archibald Henry Sayce, for example, argued that “the hieroglyphics, again, have been transformed into unintelligible lines,” and “hardly one of them is copied correctly.” William Flinders Petrie appeared to have trouble with both the text and the figures, stating that the figures were “badly drawn” and the text was “too badly copied.” Another claimed that “Cuts 1 and 3 are inaccurate copies of well-known scenes on funeral papyri.”

I haven’t mentioned Franklin Spalding yet, but his work will come up in a later post, so I wanted to take a quick moment to elaborate on that. Franklin Spalding was an Episcopalian Bishop who wrote to a bunch of Egyptologists about the Book of Abraham and then, in 1912, published the findings of those who responded that were critical of Joseph in a book titled Joseph Smith, Jr., as Translator: An Inquiry Conducted. B.H. Roberts, Joseph F. Smith, Hugh Nibley, and others rebutted this work, most notably in the February 1913 edition of The Improvement Era and in Nibley’s Abraham in Egypt. Jeremy Runnells quotes from several of these Egyptologists later, though, so we’ll discuss it all more than.

So, was the facsimile altered by Joseph or anyone else? We don’t know. We don’t have the original and there are no mentions of it being damaged or altered, but that’s yet another unanswerable question about the Book of Abraham. Anyway, these criticisms that the scene has been changed contribute to the fact that Facsimile 3 doesn’t fall neatly into categorization. Sometimes referred to as “the most neglected of the facsimiles,” much of what has been said about it has been incorrect.

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Part 15: CES Letter Book of Abraham Questions [Section F]

by Sarah Allen

I’m going to dive in and start discussing what Joseph’s interpretations of what the figures on Facsimile 2 mean compared to what “modern Egyptologists say,” but first, I do want to point out that on this facsimile, there are a lot of numbered entries where Joseph says he’s not allowed to translate those figures yet while the Egyptologists have a description. Jeremy Runnells stacks them up in such a way as to imply that Joseph was incompetent by comparison, but Joseph could not read Egyptian. His translations and explanations were given to him by revelation.

The scriptures are full of verses comparing the wisdom of God to the wisdom of men. It’s not surprising these interpretations don’t match in every case, particularly when, as we’ve pointed out, those figures could be “read” multiple different ways by multiple different groups of people. As Hugh Nibley said, “In viewing them today, we must bear in mind the principle [of] … the ‘plurality of approaches,’ which states that the Egyptian, far from being adverse to giving more than one interpretation to a character, rejoices in putting as many meanings and associations as possible into every situation. Any one figure could stand for more than one idea, deity, force or principle, so that one may not say ‘this figure cannot be Re because it is Atum.’ On the hypocephalus, to make things more interesting, all the symbols, each with its multiple meanings, are drawn together into a circle where they are closely interrelated, suggesting a great wealth of possible interpretations.” It’s also not surprising that, if those figures were interpreted as having to do with temple worship and covenants the way we discussed last week, God would not allow Joseph to reveal them to a worldwide audience. But even with those caveats, there is a surprising amount of information that aligns between the various explanations. Regardless of what Runnells is trying to imply, Joseph was not incompetent, and his interpretations of these figures do hold up against ancient Egyptian and Jewish thought.

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Part 14: CES Letter Book of Abraham Questions [Section E]

by Sarah Allen

We’re talking about Facsimile 2 today. I’ll have to discuss the facsimile explanations next time, since there’s background we need to cover for those to make sense. Anyway, Facsimile 2 is what is known as a hypocephalus:

Facsimile 2 belongs to a class of Egyptian religious documents call hypocephali (Greek: ipokefalos, hypokephalos), “under the head,” a translation of the Egyptian hry-tp with the same meaning). A hypocephalus is a small, disk-shaped object, made of papyrus, stuccoed linen, bronze, gold, wood, or clay which the Egyptians placed under the head of their dead. They believed it would magically cause the head and body to be enveloped in flames or radiance, making the deceased divine. The hypocephalus symbolized the Eye of Re or Horus, that is, the sun. The scenes portrayed on it relate the Egyptian concept of resurrection and life after death. To the Egyptians, the daily rising and setting of the sun was a vivid symbol of the resurrection. The hypocephalus itself represented all the sun encircles, the whole world. The upper portion represented the world of men and the day sky, and the lower portion (the part with the cow) represented the netherworld and the night sky.

Pearl of Great Price Central elaborates:

Today there are 158 known hypocephali which have been catalogued and/or published. Based on their attested chronological and geographical distribution, “it is clear that the hypocephalus [did] not become a widespread funerary object” in ancient Egypt. Instead they “remained exclusive pieces of funerary equipment reserved for the high clergy and for the members of their families who occupied” high-ranking positions in the temple, especially the temple of Amun at Karnak, the temple of Min at Akhmim, and the temple of Ptah at Memphis. Although hypocephali themselves appear to be later creations, the mythological and cosmological conceptions contained in hypocephali have apparent forerunners in earlier Egyptian texts.

According to Spell 162 of the Book of the Dead, hypocephali served a number of important purposes: to protect the deceased in the afterlife, to provide light and heat for the deceased, to make the deceased “appear again like one who is on earth” (that is, to resurrect them), and to ultimately transform the deceased into a god. Hypocephali were also conceived of (and even sometimes explicitly identified as) the magical eye of the sun god Re that consumed enemies with fire. Their circular shape and function to provide light, heat, and protection naturally lent themselves to this conceptualization in the minds of the ancient Egyptians.

While these might perhaps have been the primary purposes of hypocephali, it is clear from the explanatory rubric of some copies of Spell 162 of the Book of the Dead and from other surviving evidence that they also served non-funerary roles. For example, hypocephali or objects that served the same purpose as hypocephali were used as divinatory devices in the Egyptian temple and as astronomical documents. This is especially significant since Joseph Smith’s interpretation of Facsimile 2 draws connections to the temple and features several astronomical elements. Hypocephali also shared a conceptual link with temple gates. In this capacity they served, among other things, to keep out enemies and admit friends into sacred space and shared a focus on creation motifs. Once again, this parallels some of Joseph Smith’s explanations of Facsimile 2 which emphasize creation.

In summary, while hypocephali served a number of important religious and ritual purposes for the ancient Egyptians, they ultimately “point[ed] toward the Egyptians’ hope in a resurrection and life after death as a divine being.”

 

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Part 13: CES Letter Book of Abraham Questions [Section D]

by Sarah Allen

Today, we’re going to start talking about the facsimiles, beginning with Facsimile 1. Facsimile 1 is pretty unique, not just among the other Book of Abraham facsimiles but also among other similar known scenes, which are often referred to as “lion couch scenes.” This is the only facsimile that we actually have the original copy of. We don’t have the originals of Facsimile 2 and Facsimile 3 anymore. Facsimile 3 was described on one of the scrolls in the 1863 Wood Museum catalog, showing that it was among that papyri that burned in the Chicago Fire.

To begin with, this is what we have in our scriptures today. It’s an engraved copy of the original with numbered explanations of what the figures mean. This is the papyri fragment showing the facsimile. You’ll note that in the fragment, there are pencil markings filling in missing pieces, which I’ve circled in teal on this copy. We don’t know who penciled in those missing pieces or when they did it, but eyewitness testimony does suggest at least some of those missing pieces were intact when Joseph first received the papyri. There are at least two eyewitness descriptions of what seem to be the original vignette. So, maybe Joseph filled it in, maybe he didn’t. We honestly don’t know. There are claims it was filled in incorrectly, which seems to be partially true and partially untrue.

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