cougarguard.com — unofficial BYU Cougars / LDS sports, football, basketball forum and message board - Anyone seen this William Albright letter?

William Albright is the father of the "archaeological revolution" of the Bible. Apparently, he wrote this letter after Hugh Nibley showed these to him.

Quote:

Dear Mr. Howard:

Thanks for sending me a copy of the publication of Joseph Smith's Egyptian Alphabet and Grammar. There does appear to be evidence that Joseph Smith had studied some Egyptian. For one thing, he undoubtedly spent a great deal of money and effort in trying to master Egyptian, but, as you know, when the Book of Mormon was written, Egyptian had just begun to be deciphered and it is all the more surprising that there are two Egyptian names, Paanch and Pahor(an) which appear together in the Book of Mormon in close connection with a reference to the original language as being "Reformed Egyptian." I read an extremely interesting account by Fawn Brodie, No Man Knows My History, in chapter 12, in which she deals with Joseph Smith's tremendous efforts to learn languages. There were, however, as yet no Egyptian grammars or dictionaries in existence, so the best he could do was to follow books from the seventeenth and eighteenth centures (including some from the nineteenth) which treated the hieroglyphs very much as Horapollo did about the sixth century A.D.--as pure ideographs. Joseph Smith's translation does not, however, follow the pseudo-Neo-Platonism of Athanasius Kircher in the seventeenth century, but is a kind of quasi-biblical composition. In any case it has nothing whatever to do with the original Egyptian manuscript of a copy of the Book of the Dead.

The supposed digits have nothing whatever to do with the figures. You must remember that our digits go back to India through the Arabs and were not brought to Europe until less than a thousand years ago.

I do not for a moment believe that Joseph Smith was trying to mislead anyone; I accept the point of view of a Jewish friend of mine at the University of Utah, that he was a religious genius and that he was quite honest in believing that he really could decipher these ancient texts. But to insist that he did is really doing a disservice to the cause of a great church and its gifted founder.

Cordially,

(signature)

W. F. Albright