Oliver Cowdery Joseph Smith, in describing the Egyptian characters on the scrolls related to the Book of Abraham, compared them to Hebrew letters, but without the points. Without the points -- that's a noteworthy distinction. Joseph knew what points were and knew that the Egyptian characters lacked that feature. Why, then, do points abound in the characters that were supposedly translated to give the Book of Abraham?

Oliver's Joseph's statement followed a description of the papyri that is commonly cited in debates about what scroll or papyri fragments, if any, might have been used in producing the Book of Abraham.  In a letter dated Dec. 22, 1835 and later included in various Church publications (and sometimes assumed to be Joseph's statement or at least published with his consent) be said,  “The record … found with the mummies, is beautifully written on papyrus, with black, and a small part red, ink or paint, in perfect preservation.” (History of the Church, 2:348.) That statement is often used to raise the possibility that the source of the Book of Abraham that he may have been working with was not to be found among the existing fragments of the Joseph Smith Papyri because they don't seem to match that description.

But his next sentence may merit some attention as well: "The characters are such as you find upon the coffins of mummies, hieroglyphics, &c. with many characters or letters exactly like the present, (though probably not quite so square,) form of the Hebrew without points" (emphasis added). Like "Hebrew without points," a phrase indicating that Oliver and presumably Joseph were then  familiar with the appearance of Hebrew and the use of points to guide pronunciation. Joseph had already begun exploring the Hebrew books that Oliver brought to Kirtland from the East at Joseph's request and had tried teaching Hebrew to others using these books, quickly leading to the recognition that a qualified Hebrew teacher was needed.

Points, by the way, are marks such as dots that go beneath or above Hebrew letters to indicate the vowels, but Oliver's description may have also included the dagesh, a dot that can appear inside a Hebrew letter to modify its sound. Joseph's Hebrew instructor who came in Jan. 1836, Joshua Seixas, included the dagesh among the points in his A Manual Hebrew Grammar for the Use of Beginners (Andover, MA: Gould and Newman, 1834), as shown on p. 7. Perhaps more importantly, one of the few Hebrew books that we know Oliver brought to Kirtland at the end of November 1835, Moses Stuart's A Grammar of the Hebrew Language, states that "Daghesh is a point in the bosom of a letter." This occurs on p. 32 of his 4th edition from 1831 and p. 35 of his 5th edition from 1835. Stuart also describes the mappiq, another dot that can go inside a final letter he, as a point on p. 40, as Seixas does on his p. 7. So dots in, above, or below a letter can be considered points and are something Joseph recognized were present in Hebrew but not present in the Egyptian on the papyri he had.

Why is the lack of points in Egyptian writing of interest? Because many of the so-called "Egyptian" characters in the Kirtland Egyptian Papers have dots around or in them, much like Hebrew points, sometimes lots of them. Not the real Egyptian characters on the scrolls, but the concocted "Egyptian" characters that are found on the critical Book of Abraham manuscripts (Manuscript A, B, or C) that some claim show us how Joseph translated Egyptian and that are found in the other parts of the Kirtland Egyptian Papers, namely the Egyptian Alphabet documents and the Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language (GAEL). If Joseph knew that the Egyptian characters on his scrolls lacked points, then the presence of points in concocted characters would seem to indicate that they were not viewed by Joseph as real Egyptian, and perhaps that they were not his attempt to make something that "looked" Egyptian.

On the other hand, if someone like W.W. Phelps who was familiar with the basics not only of Hebrew letters and their points but also letters in other scripts such as ancient Greek, were borrowing various characters from many sources and also concocting a few where needed (e.g., filling in missing characters from the scroll that was the source for much of the Egyptian on the Book of Abraham manuscripts with characters in the margins), and if that person were seeking, say, to create insights into a "pure language" that had remnants in ancient languages such as Hebrew and Egyptian, then it is possible that he would import the concept of Hebrew points into his catalog of characters in the GAEL and, contra Joseph, give us "Egyptian" characters laced with points.

Here are some of the concocted characters in the Book of Abraham manuscripts that correspond to gaps (lacunae) in the papyrus being used as a source these characters in the margins of the English manuscript:

The two leftmost units of this are related to something on the papyrus. The rest corresponds to a lacuna was apparently concocted, perhaps using a Greek theta, the symbol of the "sign of the fifth degree, second part," and something else with a couple of "points."

There are also may be points in the GAEL, such as the forms of "iota" and related characters that comprise it (e.g., see p. 10, which has a character that is a close match for the left portion of the last character above). Some of these characters, such as the last one, appear to composites that draw upon two or more entries already in the GAEL owned by and largely in the handwriting of W.W. Phelps, again pointing to W.W. Phelps as a possible source for these characters (though others could still have used the GAEL or other means to make up these strange characters). There may also a touch of Greek influence in these characters as well as in the GAEL (forms of theta, phi, delta, heta, and maybe lambda), and again, Phelps with some prior study of Greek could be the candidate to bring in that knowledge.

John Gee once explained some reasons for seeing the GAEL as the creation and property of W.W. Phelps, not Joseph Smith, though some critics of the Book of Abraham try to claim that it is Joseph's work that was dictated to W.W. Phelps, with no evidence for such a dictation process. Gee wrote in "Joseph Smith and Ancient Egypt" (a 2015 article):

Joseph Smith’s journal also seems to indicate that the documents in Phelps’s archive belonged to Phelps. After Joseph Smith heard W. W. Phelps read a letter that Joseph Smith had him write for him that quotes from the documents, afterwards Joseph Smith “called again and enquired for the Egyptian grammar.” Yet two days later he “suggested the idea of preparing a grammar of the Egyptian language” apparently because he did not agree with Phelps’s treatment. Thus the provenance, the format, and Joseph Smith’s treatment in his journals indicate that the majority of the Kirtland Egyptian Papers belonged to Phelps. So they cannot be used to reconstruct Joseph Smith’s knowledge of Egyptian, only that of W. W. Phelps.

Joseph was clearly interested in the Egyptian language and its study, and had copied something apparently from Phelps' Egyptian Alphabet document when he wrote a couple pages in one of the Egyptian Alphabet documents, just about the only thing he clearly did in the Kirtland Egyptian Papers. But after copying some of that Egyptian Alphabet document (perhaps before or near Nov. 1835), we have no record of Joseph doing anything with the GAEL or any of the KEP documents from Nov. 1835 until 1842, as Gee explains. The Kirtland Egyptian Papers were from the Kirtland Era, not the Nauvoo era, and Joseph seems conspicuously absent in the work, in spite of the claims that the Book of Abraham manuscripts were created by live dictation from Joseph (no, they show strong evidence of being copied from an existing document and show none of the typical characteristics of live dictation from Joseph Smith). If they were needed for the translation effort and if the translation was mostly done in 1842, as many critics claim, it is surprising that Joseph's involvement with the documents in the KEP, especially the GAEL, is so minor and did not expand after the Kirtland era rather than completely disappear.

Joseph's statement about the lack of points in Egyptian is not decisive, of course, and we should not make too much about that point. I suppose whoever concocted additional characters need not have felt any restraints in what they drew. But it is a factor that may weigh against him as the "obvious" source for the concocted characters in the Book of Abraham documents and the GAEL.

By the way, please refer to my previous post where I discussed the "sign of the fifth degree, second part" mentioned at the top of the "twin manuscripts" of the Book of Abraham. That sign, a vertical line with a horizontal stroke emerging from the middle and of the vertical line and going toward the right, seems to be present somewhere in many of the concocted characters (or rotated 90 degrees in the first one shown above), suggesting again some link between the characters being considered and the sign in the heading or annotation at the top that I believe indicates the intended use of these documents: not capturing live dictation of new scripture from Joseph Smith, but copying existing text and associating them with "Egyptian" characters for use in somehow fleshing out additional material for the GAEL, especially in the designated section for the second part of the fifth degree. Why and how that would help is unclear -- the project never went any further, and work on the GAEL and other KEP documents appears to have ceased in Kirtland. But these little clues may help us better understand what strange things were being attempted in the KEP projects, which appear to be human, intellectual, and futile works derived from the existing inspiring translation of an ancient text.


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