This is an archived copy of a post written by Conflict Of Justice (conflictofjustice.com). Used with permission: Conflict Of Justice may not agree with any alterations made.
Out of the four scrolls in Joseph Smith’s Egyptian collection, we know that Joseph Smith used the missing Amenhotep scroll as his basis for the Book of Abraham text, based on witness descriptions.1 Joseph Smith identified the mummy containing the Book of Abraham source as “Onitah” and Joseph Smith’s notebooks associate “Onitah” with the missing Amenhotep scroll. In Joseph Smith’s notebooks, we find a chronology of attempts to explore the other scrolls based on this translation.
Identifying Katumin – 5 July 1835
The earliest record we have relating to Joseph Smith’s translation is the Notebook of Copied Characters. The first page says it is a partial “translation of the next page.” Immediately this leads me to ask, why would they start with an English translation and then draw the Egyptian characters they are translating from? Wouldn’t you start with the source of the translation and then give your translation? And why only give a partial translation?
This indicates that they started out with the English text and then found the Egyptian content to match to it. Joseph Smith determined what the scrolls were generally about early on, according to what Joseph Smith said about his initial contact: “I, with William W. Phelps and Oliver Cowdery, as scribes, commenced the translation of some of the characters or hieroglyphics, and much to our joy found that one of the rolls contained the writings of Abraham; another the writings of Joseph of Egypt, &c, a more full account of which? will appear in their place, as I proceed to examine or unfold them.” (6 July 1835 – Joseph Smith History)
The Egyptian content on page 2 comes from the Amenhotep scroll. It makes sense that the first Egyptian characters to be drawn would be from the Amenhotep scroll considering Joseph Smith translated the Book of Abraham first. Joseph Smith apparently used his translation of the Book of Abraham to derive this explanation about Katumin and Onita, and then matched it up with this Egyptian content. In the Valuable Discovery notebook, there are lines of hieroglyphs from the Amenhotep scroll (I haven’t seen anyone be able to decipher a translation of this part) and then a copy of the same Katumin explanation copied over from the Notebook of Copied Characters on the next page. Is this preceding Egyptian transcription in the Valuable Discovery notebook the start of Joseph Smith’s investigation and the source of the name Katumin?
So, in the the Notebook of Copied Characters, this would mean the “partial” translation should match only partially or somewhat to the Egyptian on page 2, perhaps not a strict translation but merely a strong association based on the first characters. Unfortunately, these characters are either transcribed poorly or written in an unknown script, and scholars have only been able to translate the first part: “Osiris Amen-Terp, who is true of word, mistress.” 2 This is how scholars today are able to identify the likely owner of the scroll as Amenhotep.
Then we see a notation: “Over this stood the figure of a woman” and then a drawing of the woman who presumably owned the scroll. But this isn’t a drawing of Amenhotep. This drawing is distinctly from the Ta-shert-Min scroll, which we can see in recovered papyrus fragment 5. This indicates that indeed they were concerned with finding out about the scroll’s owner–not of the owner of the Amenhotep scroll, but rather the Ta-shert-Min scroll. That was the point of the entire thing.
Instead of Ta-shert-Min, Joseph Smith names “Ka-tu-Min.” Antimormons have made a big deal about the name not matching. But though they are not the same, there are striking similarities. Ta-shert-Min translates as “Daughter of the god Min” while Ka-tu-Min translates as “my spirit is one with the god Min.” Very close matches. And even though Ka-tu-Min doesn’t say anything about being a daughter, Joseph Smith’s explanations in other notebooks stress the importance of Katumin’s role as daughter. 3
The Egyptian characters are on the left side of the page, indicating that they were drawn first, and then there is the note about a woman standing above it. Then to the right there were drawn three figures. There is a bird figure that looks very vaguely like the Ba bird in Facsimile 1 from the Hor scroll. Next to it is the Nekheny figure from Facsimile 1. Below is Ta-shert-Min standing next to Nehebkau, which we see in a Ta-shert-Min fragment. Interestingly, these three figures can be used to form the name Ka-tu-Min:
- Facsimile 1 calls Nekheny “El-Kanah”, which as we have seen related to the root word “Khana” or “Kheni”
- Ba is similar to Ka, in pronunciation and definition. But perhaps instead of being a Ba bird, they took this to be the Tm(w) Thoth bird?
- In Facsimile 2, Nehebkau gives offerings to Min
So we can get Khana-Tm(w)-Min (Katumin). Now, this is really a stretch, I know, and perhaps false. I find it highly unlikely that this is how the name Katumin was discovered, in any , but it gives us the possibility that maybe these three figures were drawn on this page because Joseph Smith picked figures in an attempt to draw a match to the name.
Investigating ‘Joseph In Egypt’ Scrolls
Book Of Breathings Is The Record Of Joseph In Egypt – This was an attempt to investigate the Ta-shert-Min scroll and other Book of Breathings scrolls from what Joseph Smith knew about the Amenhotep scroll. The notebooks start copying content from the Ta-shert-Min scroll from this point on. The Book of Abraham translation may have already been on its way or even fully complete through pure inspiration or using the Urim and Thummim. But Joseph Smith indicated he was concerned with translating a record of Joseph in Egypt as well as Abraham, and maybe it wasn’t working out for the Joseph record. Maybe the Urim and Thummim was coming up blank and he didn’t know what to do. From what Joseph Smith, we know that there were records that were kept (not necessary taught) by Joseph in Egypt, as well as the record–only one record–written by Abraham. “He soon knew what they were and said that the rolls of papyrus contained a sacred record kept by Joseph in Pharaoh’s court in Egypt and the teachings of Father Abraham.” ( 20 July 1835 – Journal History of the Church )
Notice that there were multiple rolls of Joseph in Egypt’s sacred records, but never does he indicate multiple rolls of Abraham’s writings. Rather, he makes it clear there was only one Abraham scroll. He also doesn’t say Joseph wrote those scrolls, just that he kept them. Between July 6 and Jully 20, Joseph apparently figured out that the scroll was written by someone else. The excerpt from the Amenhotep scroll is unique –the singular record–and then we also have multiple copies of another record among Joseph Smith’s Egyptian collection: the Ta-shert-Min Book of the Dead and two Books of Breathing scrolls, which derived from the Book of the Dead. So maybe the sacred record Joseph kept was the Book of the Dead. Take a look at Oliver Cowdery’s description of the Joseph scrolls: “The evidence is apparent upon the face, that they were written by persons acquainted with the history of the creation, the fall of man, and more or less of the correct ideas of notions of the Diety. The representation of the god-head—three, yet in one, is curiously drawn to give simply, though impressively, the writers views of that exalted personage. The serpent, represented as walking, or formed in a manner to be able to walk, standing in front of, and near a female figure, is to me, one of the greatest representations I have ever seen upon paper… convincing the rational mind of the correctness and divine authority of the holy scriptures… Enoch’s Pillar, as mentioned by Josephus, is upon the same roll… The inner end of the same roll, (Joseph’s record,) presents a representation of the judgment: At one view you behold the Savior seated upon his throne, crowned and holding the sceptres of righteousness and power before whom also are assembled the twelve tribes of Israel, the nations, languages and tongues of the earth…” ( Messenger & Advocate)
Oliver Cowdery said these were multiple scrolls written by multiple people, and he doesn’t make it sound like Joseph himself wrote them, but simply written by people with similar religious concepts and more-or-less correct ideas. (He also makes it sound like Abraham wasn’t the author of the Book of Abraham scroll, but that it merely contained his teachings.) Maybe Joseph in Egypt only kept this kind of record for the Egyptians, or he copied them, or he influenced them in some way.
Joseph Vs. Imhotep – Scholars have long noted the similarities between Joseph in Egypt and the ancient Egyptian architect Imhotep. This has led many to theorize that Joseph in the bible derived from the character Imhotep, or perhaps that Imhotep derived from Joseph. “Imhotep was revered as the son of PTAH, a creator-god of Memphis, the patron god of craftsmen; equated by the Greeks with Hephaestus. The cult of Imhotep reached its zenith in Greco-Roman times when sick people slept in his temples with the hope that the ‘god’ would reveal remedies to them in dreams — much like Edgar Cayce’s legendary abilities. The ‘TA’ in Ptah means earth. Take the P and H and add them to (D)Jose(r) and you have Joseph.” (Betty Rhodes)
Both Joseph and Egyptian architect Imhotep were second in command under the Egyptian king, lived to an age of 110 years old, acted as architect, stored corn for 7 years of bounty, fed the people during 7 years of famine, created grain silos, interpreted dreams, acted as physician, taxed the people 1/5 of their income, married into the local priesthood, taught astrology, and was in a family of 12 siblings. That’s a lot of similarities! Notice that Oliver Cowdery made careful note of the 12 siblings standing to be judged in a judgement scene which is now apparently lost. Did he have some idea that Joseph matched the Imhotep character behind these records?
Book Of The Dead Author – Well, it just so happens that Imhotep is credited as the original author of sacred Egyptian literature. Isn’t that interesting? “Well-known are the aretalogies of Imhotep and such Graeco-Egyptian texts as P. Oxyrhynchus 1381, that tale of a disciple who belatedly turns his hand to translating a book on god’s immense power and miraculous manifestations… Like Thoth, Imhotep is an author, composing, for example, the ssm.w nw H.t-ntr, ‘The Regulations/Ordinances of the Temple.'” (The Ancient Egyptian Book of Thoth: A Demotic Discourse… vol. 1)
This is exactly what the Book of Breathings/Book of the Dead is: ordinances of the temple . Joseph Smith associated Joseph in Egypt with the Book of the Dead scrolls, and we see evidence that this could be the case. But the problem is Joseph Smith’s collection of texts were much-later derivatives from whatever it was Joseph kept. We certainly see temple themes that align with modern LDS concepts, but maybe the context was too far gone to get a translation from it using the Urim and Thummim. This would explain why Joseph Smith was interested in translating the Ta-shert-Min scroll and embarked on this painstaking comparison of characters. He had to.
Oh, and is it just coincidence that the Book of Abraham source talked about “Amunhotep” and the Egyptian mythological name for Joseph in Egypt was “Imhotep”? 4
Determining An Alphabet
Once he had matched the name Katumin, Joseph Smith tried to find something out about the Egyptian characters. On the page 3 of the Valuable Discovery notebook we see the English text about Katumin copied over and matched up with characters loosely based on the characters at the beginning of the Amehotep excerpts. We know this page of the Valuable Discovery notebook probably came later because it includes added words that were not in the Notebook of Egyptian Characters English text.
The problem here is that the Egyptian characters look loosely similar yet contain striking differences. They are mixed around, flipped, and drawn differently. They match none of the Egyptian excerpts in Joseph Smith’s notebooks. Why? Maybe because they didn’t come from the same place! The way these characters have been moved and flipped around on page 3 of Valuable Discovery now renders it as “Recitation of Osiris” (dd mdw in wsir), no longer “Osiris Amenhotep true of word.” This phrase “recitation of Osiris” shows up in the Book of the Dead, and we can even see it above the figure’s hand in Facsimile 3, which comes from the Book of the Dead. The characters are stacked above each other like in Facsimile 3, not side-by-side like in the Amenhotep excerpts. Maybe Joseph Smith was looking somehwhere else, a fragment now missing, and he saw that these characters looked similar, so he tried to match them up to specific parts of the Katumin explanation. We do not know where the characters for page 3 of Valuable Discovery came from.
Scholars have attacked Joseph Smith for matching a single cobra hieroglyph–two semicircles on top of each other forming an oval–as “Katumin.” They say it is really the hieroglyph for “speak.” But when we look at his explanation of Katumin in the Grammar and Alphabet notebook, we see it is actually correct as the cobra hieroglyph. As the website egyptianalphabetandgrammar.blogspot.com discovered, Joseph Smith started with two O looking shapes, and then that became a flat oval with a hook sticking out of the top in the Valuable Discoveries notebook. Then, in the Egyptian Alphabet notebooks that became a curled line over a semicircle. Egyptology experts claim this is the hieroglyph ?d “to speak.” But actually these three characters make the Egyptian word Kt, which means “uraeus.” Cobra in Egyptian is “Iaret”, similar to the Greek word for cobra “Uraeus,” a serpent worn on the head denoting royalty. So we get “Kt-Min” and we get clear indications of royalty. The next character, the pole, gives an M sound. Then the reed symbol gives an I, and the water symbol an N.
It is important to note that no-where does it say in the Valuable Discovery notebook that this is a translation of text. The Egyptian Alphabet notebooks and Grammar & Alphabet notebook likewise don’t claim to give text translations, nor do the manuscripts. Joseph Smith said he was simply deriving an alphabet of Egyptian from the Book of Abraham. The purpase was to understand each part of a hieroglyph. “The remainder of this month [July 1835] I was continually engaged in translating an alphabet to the Book of Abraham, and arranging a grammar of the Egyptian language as practiced by the ancients.” (17 July 1835 – Joseph Smith History)
If he was translating an alphabet from the Book of Abraham, doesn’t that mean he already had the Book of Abraham translated to get an alphabet from? To me, this indicates Joseph Smith already had the Book of Abraham text at hand to pull alphabet letters from and that he was trying to first understand the language, not give text translations. The beginnings of this alphabet process can be seen in the Valuable Discovery notebook. He wasn’t deriving the name Katumin from a single Egyptian character in the Valuable Discovery notebook as Antimormons claim, but rather making a comparison of single characters with parts of what they already knew about Katumin. And these comparisons prove to be correct.
Comparing Egyptian Characters
Joseph Smith and his scribes created what is now known as the Egyptian Alphabet notebooks as they dissected characters from the Amenhotep scroll. What Joseph Smith learned from the Katumin investigation was now incorporated in a new exploration. The first character to show up in these notebooks is apparently taken from the third part of the Katumin comparison, and in Egyptian is wsir, the name Osiris. Joseph Smith expalins it here as pronounced “ah” and meaning “The first Being who excercises power.” In the Grammar & Alphabet it curls into what looks like an Egyptian vulture and becomes “Ah brah—aam— a father of many nations, referring to Abraham.” This is interesting because Abraham constistantly takes the place of Osiris in each Facsimile, and this follows the same pattern. It also is correctly pronounced “ah” like Joseph Smith said. The letter is alef in Egyptian, which corresponds to alpha in Greek, Alef in Arabic, and Alep in Hebrew. The next several characters are variations of this letter for the comparison that would happen to the Hor scroll.
We can see pieces of the Katumin comparison characters in these first Egyptian Alphabet notebooks characters , but others we don’t. For example, the final character, a cross, we don’t find on the page about Katumin–but it does show up in the original Amenhotep excerpt.
It is important to note that the later Manuscript notebooks which match Egyptian characters with text from the Book of Abraham text often ignore the Egyptian characters in the Egyptian Alphabet notebooks . For example, the second character–derived from the “ah” character– is V-shaped and explained as: “The first man.” The Grammar & Alphabet matches it with “The first man, or Adam coming from Adam.” This is a perfect match with the Book of Abraham 1:3 which reads: “from… the first man, who is Adam.” Yet the Manuscript notebooks align no Egyptian character with this phrase and the V-shaped character is no-where to be seen on the entire page. This tells me the Egyptian Alphabet notebooks and Grammar & Alphabet was derived from the Amenhotep scroll , just as Joseph Smith indicated. Then characters from the Hor scroll were then matched in consecutive order with Abraham text based on resemblence to these characters in the notebooks and their matching explanations.
We see how Joseph Smith by “degrees” related the Katumin comparison to the Hor characters. He explained that the first character’s derivative was “The name of a? royal family, in the female line.” In the Grammar & Alphabet notebook, we get a deeper root meaning: a lineage that kept the records & knowledge of embalming. He finally determined that Katumin referred to the one “with whom a record of the fathers was entrusted.” Not necessarily the person’s name but their role. The associative Egyptian character means “speech,” remember. Records vs. Speech. So, through the iterative degrees of finding meaning through comparison of different contexts, Joseph Smith settled on an explanation very close to what we now know is the Egyptian dictionary definition.
As we look at these Hor scroll characters which were matched in consecutive order, we can compare them to the characters in the Egyptian Alphabet notebooks and get a similar match to the corresponding English text. Antimormons have tried to match the entire English paragraph with each character, but this results in nothing. They only do this to try to confirm their pre-conclusion that the Manuscript notebooks were translation documents. They weren’t. The characters were never meant to correspond to entire paragraphs of text. The reference numbers that Joseph Smith included for the first two characters prove this.
Why would Joseph Smith include numbered citations if these characters were meant to refer to entire paragraphs of text? The first two characters get citations with single words inside the paragraphs of text. Also, why is there no Egyptian character column for verse 14?
Then we see the handwriting change because Joseph Smith took a long break and changed writers. The new writer wrote in much nicer script with no additions or corrections to the English text, indicating the Book fo Abraham translation was complete and fully refined by this point. There are no citations from this point on, unfortunately, but we see a line break whenever they introduced a new Egyptian character. This indicates they wrote the Egyptian character in the left column, and then wrote the English text until they got to the phrase that matches, and then added a line break. So the Egyptian character matches with the sentence at the end of its corresponding Book of Abraham paragraph. Look at the first two characters:
| Character | Egyptian Alphabet Definition | Grammar & Alphabet Definition | Book of Abraham Match |
 | First Being with supreme power | place of happiness, purity, holiness rest. see | “In the land of the Chaldeans” “saw” Abraham 1:1 |
 | First Being with supreme power | Ah brah-aam father of nations, prince of peace, keeps commandments, patriarch, heir, high priest | “Abraham” Abraham 1:1-2 |
The rest of the characters match up with words or phrases at the end of the corresponding Book of Abraham text. A good example of this is the sixth character. The final words of the corresponding Book of Abraham text is “priest of Elkkener.”
| Character | Egyptian Alphabet Definition | Grammar & Alphabet Definition | Book of Abraham Match |
 | A royal family name | Lineage keeping records & embalming | “priest of Elkkener” (ref. Facs. 1) Abraham 1:7-8 |
The first letter, a Y-shaped figure, is explained in Egyptian Alphabet as “The first Being” and matches nicely with the Hebrew El, meaning God, in El-kenah. The second part of the word El-kenah, Kenah or Kkener, is very similar to the Egyptian name for the land of Canaan, which is Kinahhi or Khana. The Hebrew root word for Canaan, kana, looks very much like this entire Egyptian character reversed.
The first part of the Egyptian Alphabet notebooks take characters from the Amenhotep scroll. The “second part of the first degree” after that takes characters from the Pure Language of Abraham that we know Joseph Smith earlier received through inspiration. Interestingly, that earlier “Pure Language of Abraham” document aligns the characters with single words, like we would expect in a proper translation dictionary. We don’t see paragraphs of text next to characters that Antimormons incorrectly claim indicates a translation attempt in the Abraham documents. This further proves that the characters next to English text in the Abraham documents were comparisons of single words or short phrases, not translations.
Abandoned – The third part of the Egyptian Alphabet notebooks take characters from the Hor scroll. This indicates Joseph Smith started making comparisons with excerpts from the Hor scroll after he had dissected the Amenhotep characters. They started from the beginning (How did Joseph Smith know the beginning was at the top right of the page to the left of the Facsimile?) and wrote down the hieroglyphs sequentially next to the Book of Abraham text that they appeared to have some kind of correspondence to. They didn’t get very far, however. We can see as the character comparison in the Manuscript notebooks progressed how things got more and more haphazard. They only made it a few verses until they gave up. The Joseph Smith record (Book of Breathings) was simply not to be deciphered.
One final thing to consider is that along with discerning meanings through comparison, another thing Joseph Smith used was what he knew about Hebrew. We see lots of Hebrew names attached to the Egyptian characters, such as Beth and Iota. Oliver Cowdery said in December 22, 1835, after this entire exercise was abandoned: “With many characters or letters exactly like the present (though probably not quite so square), form of the Hebrew without points.” This apparently helped them out. Or perhaps hindered them.
Antimormon Narrative Don’t Make Sense – Antimormons tell a convoluted story about Joseph Smith’s translation process, where we imagined up something about Katumin, then expounded it with random characters, then randomly assigned those characters to the Hor scroll hieroglyphs and wrote up paragraphs alongside each hieroglyph. It doesn’t make sense.
- If the Hor document was the source of the Book of Abraham, why did they only get to chapter 2 in this comparison? There are several chapters that are unaccounted for. Why do the three Manuscript documents start and end at different places?
- Each single hieroglyph character matches up to long paragraphs of text? (Except the first couple which have citations next to them, and verse 14 for some reason) Why would Joseph Smith claim he was translating paragraphs from a single character? Why do the first couple verses have all sorts of corrections and then suddenly pristine English text without a single correction?
- The hieroglyphs overlap the page’s columns, while the English text does not. This suggests that the English was written first, and that it therefore came from a previous source.
- These hieroglyphs do not appear in the Grammar and Alphabet list, so their definitions were apparently not explored like the facsimiles were. Why not? Both documents were written around the same time, after all.
- Joseph Smith wrote that he commenced translation immediately after he got the scrolls in 1833. But these documents were started later, after the Egyptian Alphabet. Why?
- Why were there three separate documents with this same alignment of hieroglyph vs. text?
- How could someone make up a book of scripture this way? How could a person make up a text by lining up random paragraphs to random glyphs?
See Also: The Recovered Joseph Smith Papyri Were Never The Basis For The Book Of Abraham^See a full explanation here. In this previous article, we looked at witness description of scroll size, ink color, preservation state, and resemblance to Hebrew to show that it could only match the missing Amenhotep scroll. It has now become clear as well that Joseph Smith said the Book of Abraham source was found together with a mummy he named Onitah. Charlotte Haven said the “long roll” contained “the writing of Abraham” and that “another roll” contained the figure of a serpent “standing on the tip of his tail” which we recognize in the Ta-shert-Min fragment. So it couldn’t have been that scroll. LaFayette Knight wrote in 1843: “I went into his house and had a comfortable chat with him, and then examined the four mummies one of which his Mother told me was King Onitus, on whose breast was found the writing of Abraham It being as they say, the astronomy taught by him.” If Joseph Smith’s Notebook of Copied Characters associates an English translation talking about Onitus with an excerpt from the Amenhotep scroll, doesn’t this mean the Amenhotep scroll was the Book of Abraham source? ^ See The Joseph Smith Papyri , Dee Jay Nelson, 1968
Nelson looked at “the three lines of Egyptian, on the same page as Joseph Smith’s legged serpent drawing in the Valuable Discovery Notebook” and tells us “18 of the 26 characters in the first line are identifiable (70%). 17 of these form the name of the beneficiary in the following context, ‘Osiris Amen-Terp, who is tme of word, mistress.’”
On another excerpt “from a page of Joseph Smith’s Valuable Discovery Notebook”, Nelson again translates the first lines “lines 1 and 2 is the complete formalized name phrase, ‘Osiris, Amen-Terp, who is true of word, daughter of Na-Nub, who is true of word.’ In lines 6 and 7 this identical name phrase is repeated. In lines 7 and 8 Osiris Amen-Terp is again written, but this time without the mother’s name.” ^ As the Egyptian characters that were lined up with Katumin in the Valuable Discovery notebook got dissected in the Egyptian Alphabet and Alphabet & Grammar notebooks, we see a horizontal line explained as “a woman, married or unmarried,= daughter” and we see a semicircle with a horizontal line explained as the land of Egypt “settled by her Sons she being a daughter of Ham.” ^ Among the three other scrolls, Joseph Smith may have picked the Ta-shert-Min scroll to investigate because it was in best preservation and because as Book of the Dead it was closest to what Joseph In Egypt had–the Book of Breathings derived from the Book of the Dead. One major difference is: “In castrast to the Book of the Dead, Amun plays an important role here.” Maybe this could help explain why the Amunhotep scroll speaks of an Amun-hotep instead of Immu-hotep?