Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: I don't know of a more controversial book than the Book of Abraham. Even the Book of Mormon doesn't receive the same level of criticism and ridicule that the Book of Abraham has, because this book, we uniquely can check Joseph Smith's work. So we have fragments of the papyri of the Book of Abraham. And because of that, Egyptologists have now looked at the papyri and critics of the church have said, well, Egyptologists have now proven the Book of Abraham completely false.
And because we can check Joseph Smith's work, it provides a really interesting use case to see, like, well, what is the relationship between scriptural texts that Joseph Smith produces and the actual translation? So we brought on an Egyptologist to help us check Joseph Smith's work and understand more about how do we even approach these questions about the Book of Abraham that can be controversial, concerning, but ultimately, like, really faith promoting. So Kerry Muhlstein is an Egyptologist who teaches at Brigham Young University. In Ancient Scripture, you received your PhD from UCLA in Egyptology on, like, a gajillion, like, committees and boards in the Egyptological field. You're also an archaeologist. You direct a gig at the Fayoum in Egypt, which is west of the Nile. And so you're highly accomplished in your field. We're excited to have you. So thank you for being here with us.
[00:01:14] Speaker B: Oh, it's my pleasure. I'm excited to be with all of you.
[00:01:17] Speaker C: Sweet. Let the record show, of the two Egyptologists on the show, this one's the better one between the two. So I defer everything to Kerry, just older.
[00:01:28] Speaker D: When Jasmine says we brought on an Egyptologist, it's because our record, regular Egyptologist just wasn't.
[00:01:33] Speaker C: No, no, not up to snuff. This guy's the real deal here.
[00:01:35] Speaker B: Absolutely not true, but just older and been around a little longer.
[00:01:39] Speaker A: And this Egyptologist has recently published a nice book, obviously. Karen Mussolin has published, like, a ton of stuff in the field of Egyptology and on the Book of Abraham. But this is a very nice, thin, approachable primer for anyone who wants a good introduction to how to approach these issues. And so we figured we could talk about this. But you've also done a lot of work on the facsimiles and facsimile one in particular. So I'm really excited to just dive in to see how do we approach the Book of Abraham? How do we make sense of some of these questions that people have around, like, did Egyptologists really prove the Book of Abraham wrong?
[00:02:10] Speaker C: And let me just say on the outset this is a big topic, Right. For all of our listeners, and so we won't be able to cover every little detail. So stay tuned both for our podcast and we totally need to give Kerry some due credit. He has a great podcast. Do you want us a little bit your podcast?
[00:02:28] Speaker B: Sure. My podcast is the Scriptures are Real.
We do weekly and for Old Testament year, we're really gearing up to do a ton for people. So it's probably won't be just one episode, often two or three episodes a week to really help people understand the Old Testament. Or sometimes longer episodes that have. All my episodes will have several segments in them anyway. So it follows the Come follow me weekly schedule. But we try and really get into the reality behind things, especially with the Old Testament. We're going to have archeology sessions or segments and geography and language segments and things like that to make this. And part of what we'll do here, we're going to get into the actual artifacts, the things that we know about, to make this become real so that people can understand it better.
[00:03:13] Speaker C: So let's plug here then, a second recommendation. This is our first two for one episode, I think, of Informed Saints. Carrie has another publication recently, and this is actually for free online. And we'll include a link in the show notes.
It was published in the Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections. I think Deseret Book publishes that. Right?
That's some apologetic journal. No, this is a mainstream Egyptological journal that Kerry's published in. And the name of your title?
[00:03:40] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a long title.
[00:03:41] Speaker C: It's an article. It's a long title, but it's good.
[00:03:42] Speaker B: Let me preface it before you give it. So this was actually a lecture I did as part of a conference which ended up being in 2020. So we were all going to.
I think it was Bucharest, if I remember right now I can't even remember because we didn't go. We just did it on Zoom. Right. But it was. It was called, I think Priests, Gods and Their Depictions, I think was something like. That was the name. So this was a lecture I did for other Egyptologists, got feedback from them, and then published it in this journal where you get peer review and feedback as well.
[00:04:12] Speaker C: So anyway, no, that's good context and.
[00:04:14] Speaker B: That will help make sense of the title because I was actually playing on the title of the conference.
[00:04:18] Speaker C: Oh, okay. That's good. So the title is A Priest, His Gods and His Depiction. Look at that. There you go.
Creation Execration and the Roles, Texts and Vignette of Horror at Karnak. So there's a lot going into this, and I'm sure for a lot of our audience, this is like, what the heck? Karnak Horror execration vignette. So could you walk us through Carrie a little bit? And we do want to spend some time on Facsimile one, because part of the TikTok narrative is we have Facsimile one. We can translate it, and it's nothing like what Joseph Smith said. So give us your story on Facsimile one on Hor. So he's an ancient Egyptian priest. Karnak is this. It's a city in Egypt. A temple.
[00:04:58] Speaker B: Yes, but it's like a city.
[00:05:00] Speaker C: It's like a city. It's huge. Like a city. Temple complex.
[00:05:02] Speaker B: 60 acres.
[00:05:02] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. It's also known as the city of Thebes. Right. In ancient Egypt. Right. You can go there today. There's a huge temple complex. It's great. So tell us all about who is Hor? What is he doing at the temple at Karnak and living in Thebes? What the heck is an execration ritual? What the heck is a vignette? Give us the Kerry Muhlstein narrative of Facilit.
Assess the TikTok narrative effects and like that.
[00:05:24] Speaker D: And part of that, if you can, and I think you can, because I've read your stuff and you do the question Jasmine asked, why would he potentially have been interested in the story of Abraham?
[00:05:34] Speaker B: Yeah, we'll for sure do that.
And I will also be clear. In fact, in this article, I have a kind of a long footnote where I say to all my Egyptological colleagues, this vignette, which is what Egyptologists call drawings on papyri like this, okay? So this vignette is also printed in a book of scripture that is accepted as scripture from the church I belong to and that sponsors the university that I work for. And I will explore the faith ramifications of this in a venue that is for faith. But here I am exploring the Egyptological aspects of this.
[00:06:12] Speaker A: So you're not, like, trying to prove the Book of Abraham true in this particular paper? You're trying to figure out what this papyri can tell us about Hor in Egypt.
[00:06:20] Speaker B: Exactly. Because so my approach to the Book of Abraham, it's always been, I've ended up defending the Book of Abraham, and people call me an apologist and so on. But my approach has always been, I want to get what's going on, I want to understand the story, I want to understand the people. I Want to understand the theology that's going on here. I just want to get it. And the best way for me has always been look at the history. So sometimes that's 19th century history, sometimes that's 3rd century BC and sometimes that's 2000 BC Bronze Age. Abraham. Bronze Age, exactly right. That's a phrase we.
We use that other people would say, what in the world you talking about?
But I. I wanted those stories. So this was part of my. I want to understand Egyptologically what is going on with this person and this drawing. But as I did so. And this happens to me again and again and again. I'm just really trying to do good scholarship, understand the story. And as I do, I'm like, oh, that helps me understand the book of Abraham.
[00:07:15] Speaker A: Cool.
[00:07:16] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. It just happens to me again and again and again.
[00:07:19] Speaker C: All right, let's hear it.
What's the story?
[00:07:21] Speaker B: Whore is a priest. He's a very educated, very elite, very powerful priest in the most prestigious temple in the world at the time, Karnak Temple. He is a priest for. In fact, he has three different priestly titles for Amun Ra.
That's the big temple at the Karnak. That's. And that's. He's. Well, this phase of Amun Ra that he's a priest for is called Amun Ra, King of the gods. That. That gives you an idea of how important.
[00:07:48] Speaker C: How important he is.
[00:07:49] Speaker B: Right.
He is also a priest for it. So with the big Amun Ra temple attached to it, like here is a temple for Mantu, which also has associated with it a God named Min who massacres his enemies. He's a priest for that God attached to it. Over here is a temple for Khonsu. There's another temple for Khonsu within the Arnak or the Amun temple, but there's another little one for Khonsu. And these are different aspects of Khonsu.
This is Khonsu, who overthrew in Thebes, or Khonsu is powerful in Thebes. Different ways to translate it. He's a priest for that God as well. In those roles, he will do things where he will dress and wash and clothe the statues of those deities. And that's kind of the daily ritual where daily the priest on behalf of all mankind in some ways, or the whole world comes back into the presence of that deity. That's one of the roles he'll be doing.
[00:08:45] Speaker A: There's ritual washing, clothing, anointing. That sounds kind of familiar.
[00:08:49] Speaker C: Yeah, rings a bell, right?
[00:08:51] Speaker B: Yeah. And feeding that's the part I wish we still did.
[00:08:55] Speaker A: I do miss that. Not that I was alive for it.
[00:08:57] Speaker B: Yeah, well, they took the cafeterias out of temple anyway. All right, so. But. So that's one of the rituals that he would do.
[00:09:03] Speaker C: So feeding or clothing washing, anointing and feeding the statue of the God and himself going through priestly preparations in that role.
[00:09:10] Speaker B: So, in fact, let's put it this way. What that ritual is really about is approaching God.
[00:09:15] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:09:15] Speaker B: And being reunified with. With God. That's what that ritual is about. So he is. He engages in rituals where he, on behalf of the king and the king on behalf of all mankind, is enabled to regain the presence of deity.
Okay, so then we have also he does recreative rituals, especially for Khonsu. But there's going to be a little bit with. With some of the others. And in the article I get into the. The interaction of creation rituals with some other rituals and that we'll get to in a minute. But there's definitely. With Khonsu, recreation elements, there are a little bit with men and with Amun as well.
Then for all three, he would have been engaged in what we call these execration rituals. So execration rituals are rituals where you are trying to get rid of bad, dangerous, evil forces. And you do it in all sorts of ways. Sometimes it's smashing pots, sometimes it's writing the names of these things on papyri or on figurines made of clay or wood or stone, or all sorts of things. And you burn them, you smash them, you stomp them, you spit on them, you stab them, you urinate on them. You do everything you can to get rid of these bad forces. Right. And that's a ritual. Sometimes it's actual people. We didn't think that for a long time, but that's some of the research I've done. And we know now sometimes it's actual people, but the vast majority of the time it's. It's objects.
[00:10:44] Speaker D: So. So I want to just put.
So what you're saying is sometimes an execration ritual is the ritual killing or sacrificing of an actual person.
[00:10:55] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Robert Rittner was the first one to help demonstrate that.
But there have been more of us that have been able to.
[00:11:02] Speaker D: And that's something to help people appreciate. I know that's something. A big part of the work you've done, the Egyptological work you've done and published in various venues has been exploring that.
[00:11:13] Speaker B: Yeah. And again, that was an element where, because of The Book of Abraham. I had been teaching, along with everyone else that the Egyptians never did anything like that. And then someone pointed out to me Robert Rittner's work, and I was like, oh, I'm wrong now. I want to understand this right now. We should be clear on this as well. That happens to every researcher and every professor. You are writing or teaching something that later you figure out is wrong. Now, some people just double down on what they were wrong about. Others will say, okay, if I was wrong, let's figure out what's really going on. And I was fascinated by that. And I said, okay, I want to understand what's really going on. And so I looked at it from an Egyptological point of view, again, really wanting to understand that. And as I was doing it, I was like, oh, look at what this says about the Book of Abraham.
That was the step that I was. I wanted to understand the Book of Abraham later. I wanted to do the Egyptology first.
[00:12:01] Speaker A: Certainly, execration rituals aren't, like, foreign to. Even our modern society will do similar things, whether it's at sporting events or. I just saw the movie Wicked, where they burn an effigy of the Wicked Witch of the west because they want to, like, get rid of, you know.
[00:12:13] Speaker C: Her power over the west, evil presence or her power.
Let me read here, if I may. This is kind of fun because you document, Carrie, in your article, that at the little temple or chapel of Many Massacres, enemies, On the walls of that chapel, there are inscriptions.
And one of them, it says on the eastern side, he's described. We're talking about the king identified as the God Horus, who gets syncretized with men. And the king, ideally, is the one who performs these rituals, but he can't be there all the time. So on the wall inscriptions, they'll. They'll say as though the king is doing it, but he's just sort of symbolically doing it.
[00:12:46] Speaker B: Right? Yeah. In the end, it's the priest.
[00:12:48] Speaker C: It's the priest that's doing it, standing up for the king. But it says the king as Horus, quote, Horus, the victorious bull, who subdues evil ones, who causes enemies to cease to exist. And on the Western wall, he is said to be Horus, the powerful, mighty killer who wields the knife in these execration rituals. So it's explicit that one of the priestly roles that Hor has, he is reenacting the ritual slaughter of enemies of sort of, you know, cosmic symbols of chaos or injustice or disorder. He has to subdue Them as part of this cultic enterprise at Karnak. Right.
[00:13:23] Speaker B: And sometimes with a knife.
[00:13:24] Speaker C: And sometimes with a knife.
[00:13:26] Speaker B: Yeah, with a ritual knife, undoubtedly. There's a specific flint ritual knife that in the end looks exactly like what we see in facsimile 1. But anyway, so that's. That's right. You've got these execration rituals. And one of the things that I've noticed and I've published in two different places now, just kind of exploring different elements of it, is that execration and creation are always tied together.
That's because as you recreate, you don't want to recreate with messed up stuff in there.
So you get rid of all the bad stuff so you can recreate in the perfect pristine state.
[00:13:57] Speaker A: Okay, Right.
[00:13:58] Speaker B: So like, if we want to get back to Eden, we don't want to have death there, as it were. Right. So you get rid of death, then you can get to Eden and you're not going to die. Right now we're not actually trying to get back to Eden. We want to get past Eden to make a better place.
But that's the idea, right? The execration and creation are integrally intertwined as you get rid of the bad to be able to create the good in the way you want to create it.
[00:14:21] Speaker C: So I can hear some alarm bells going off in my mind as you're describing this with our book of Abraham and with our facsimile one. So we want to tie in effects, only one here now, but just to wrap up this interesting conversation, to see we're on the same page.
Excuse me. Hoare is a priest at Karnak for Amun Ra, King of the gods. And in that capacity, and maybe before.
[00:14:43] Speaker B: You do this, let me just even add, please, because it will give context to where I think you're going.
One of the things that. Well, so Mark Smith from Oxford and a number of others, and including me in this article, have been able to show is that priests in general, but especially priests from this time period, were very influenced in the funerary literature that they chose or created. And this priest is creating. He's in the. In the midst of creating new literature, or he's part of just being right on the avant garde. This. This copy, this text that's next to the vignette is the earliest copy we know of this particular text.
[00:15:16] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:15:16] Speaker B: It may be the earliest ever, or maybe it's just the earliest that survives.
[00:15:19] Speaker C: So as far as we can tell, earliest copy of the Book of Breathings of that particular this particular version of it is our Joseph Smith papyri.
[00:15:26] Speaker B: Exactly right.
And so he is innovative. And priests from this time period are creating new texts that are based on their ritual temple experience.
So think of that as you say, what you're going to say.
[00:15:40] Speaker C: The owner of facsimile one in antiquity, he's a priest named Hor. He is a priest of Amun Ra in which he ritually enacts entrance back into God's presence to clothe and wash the God, right? To receive revelation. He is a priest of men who massacres his enemies, men who slaughters his enemies. And in that capacity, he is going to be performing execration rituals, perhaps with a knife, perhaps with a knife on.
Right. On effigies at times.
And I, I think this ties in this, as you were saying, once you know the full story, it ties in nicely. So bring it home to us for the next little bit in our conversation with Fex.
So I, I pull up this facsimile one. I see this and the narrative I hear is common funerary, lion couch scene, right? I hear all the time, common funerary pagan scene, right? I, I, I'm reassured all the time that there's dozens and dozens and dozens of examples of this lion couch scene. And we know exactly what it means.
[00:16:39] Speaker A: So it can't be, so it can't.
[00:16:41] Speaker C: Be anything about sacrificing Abraham. So walk us through that a little bit, tie this all in with our effect. Simile 1. You mentioned priests are creating their own sort of vignettes or things. I already know the answer to this, so I'm kind of being a little coy.
Is this a unique facsimile in any ways? Carrie or vignette? Is this really just a common funerary scene where we have hundreds of examples of how is this unique or interesting?
[00:17:01] Speaker B: So there are lots of drawings that are fairly similar. This one is completely unique. We can demonstrate that Egyptologically, it is unique in a number of elements from the things that are underneath it. And the way that the, the person is dressed and moving and the placement of the priests and the hands and everything. When you put. There are a number of small elements of it that are unique. There are a number of small elements of it that are almost unique, very, very rare. And then the lion couch, seen the fact that there's an altar that has a lion on it and a person on it, that's common, but small elements and the thing as a whole is unique, let's be clear about that. But it ties in Beautifully this and the text of the Book of Abraham with what we know about Whore. So here you have a depiction, and in the Book of Abraham you have the story of someone being saved. Abraham, namely, being saved from a dangerous force. Let me do. I'll also say that the closest parallel we have to this, and there's really only one drawing that I think is a fairly close parallel. It's not a. I don't think a true parallel, but the closest parallel.
[00:18:06] Speaker D: One of the things that is sometimes hard, I feel like when I'm reading about this, and especially when I was reading your article in the Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections, because you're writing to Egyptologists that you assume have some familiarity with this imagery. And I don't actually know what very many of these pictures look like, but what I did do in preparation for this is I just googled, like, lion couch scenes and I looked at a ton of images, and when you say, like, closest parallel, but it's not that close. Like, all of the images of lion couch scenes I saw, none of them are really all that similar to this.
[00:18:39] Speaker A: What is a lion couch scene?
[00:18:40] Speaker B: So it's someone. A lion couch scene is.
You see the altar and it's. It's leonine, by the way. So lit by leonine, it looks like a lion, by the way. If you were to look at, like in England, and it's made its way from a long time ago, but it's made its way into the US and you'll find, like, chairs and tables that have little lion pots at the bottom. They are descendants of this. They're the cultural descendants of this. So sometimes you've sat in lion couches, actually.
But they. They call this a lion couch scene because the altar looks like a lion. And we have examples of these in lots of places, not uncommon, both the drawings and the actual altars.
And there's someone on it, so that's why we call it a lion couch scene. There is one in a temple in Dendera that is fairly similar to what we have here. And the text that goes with it is about protecting someone from evil forces and killing the enemies and the foes. So I don't think it's a true parallel. But if we do want to look at Egyptological parallels, the parallel for this one is about what Joseph Smith says this is about. So anyone who says that this has nothing to do with what Egyptologists say didn't get the whole story right. They didn't do all the research and find out that actually the closest One is exactly about this.
[00:19:51] Speaker C: So while there may indeed be a funerary sort of context for this scene.
[00:19:57] Speaker A: When you say funerary context, does that mean the person on the couch is.
[00:20:00] Speaker C: Dead or in some cases, in the process of being revived?
[00:20:06] Speaker A: So it's supposed to be like a mummy on the couch in a lot.
[00:20:08] Speaker B: Of scenes, Sometimes a mummy, sometimes someone coming back to life.
[00:20:11] Speaker C: Coming back to life. And it kind of blurs conceptually, but that's what I mean by funerary scenes.
[00:20:15] Speaker A: But the Book of Abraham talks about how he's being sacrificed.
[00:20:17] Speaker C: Sacrificed. Right. And the discrepancy, people understandably say is, well, wait a second, is it a. Egyptologists say it's a funerary scene. Joseph Smith says it's a sacrifice scene. What your research is indicating is that there's conceptual blending between these two realms. And so it's not necessarily an either or, but you can expect. Accommodate both sort of contexts at once if you have the fuller story, the fuller understanding.
[00:20:39] Speaker B: Exactly. And to blend that even more, there are certain elements of this that are very clear that it's a temple setting.
[00:20:45] Speaker C: Oh, which ones could you point us out?
[00:20:46] Speaker B: Well, especially what Joseph Smith calls the columns. It's also Egyptologically, we call it a nish facade. And you and I have talked about that on my podcast. But at the very bottom, Robert Rittner has pointed out that that's included in papyri only when it's has a temple setting.
[00:21:04] Speaker A: So those vertical lines below.
[00:21:06] Speaker B: Yeah, the very bottom thing, below the crocodile. The very, very bottom thing.
That's exactly right. And there are a couple other things that it's. It's really clear this. There's a temple setting to this. So there.
[00:21:19] Speaker C: It's also the offering table there, right by the head of the lion couch. You see those all the time in temple context. They put up these little offering tables that you can put plants, ointment. Sometimes it's like beer and bread. In fact, you got little jugs underneath it there, putting plants on top of it. So that seems to have a temple connection as well as a funerary connection. You get that in tomb settings. So again, blending the two areas together.
[00:21:41] Speaker B: So like us, the temples and the realm of the dead blend together.
Right.
That's not uncommon for any place and any temple. So this seems to be a papyrus that is blending together temple and funerary context all at once, which is what we'd expect. We know that's what priests from this time period are doing. So let me just kind of go a little Further though, with the things that Hoar was doing and show how this, when I read the, or when I study that, I think, oh, maybe he really would be interested in the text of the Book of Abraham because we've got both the drawing and the story of Abraham being saved from bad forces which allows him to actually have interaction with God. So he's will a number of times in the Book of Abraham be in one way or another coming into the presence of God and making a covenant with God where he, he has that greater proximity and access to God, which is what horror would be interested in. Then we get the creation scene, right? So in the Book of Abraham and in some ways what the Book of Abraham is about is removing Abraham from the dangerous forces so that he through covenant is born again or recreated. So you got rid of the problem. So you can recreate someone and their relationship with God in a safe and better setting. And then that leads to both understanding the cosmos, that's Abraham chapter three. And how we approach God through the cosmos, which temples are about and these temples and the cosmos leads to the creation. And that's exactly what Hor would have been interested in. And it's exactly what we find in the Book of Abraham. So, and I'll just throw in there, we also know there are priests from this time period who are collecting stories about Jewish figures and characters and incorporating it into their religious rituals. And so if it's not who's doing that, it's his friend in the next door room, right? Someone is doing that somewhere, so why not?
It just makes sense, right? So all of this, this comes together in a way that makes me take more seriously the missing papyrus theory than I have before. And you can see again, there's my approach. I'm trying to do the Egyptology to understand things better. It does make me lean more that way because it just makes so much sense to me that horror would be someone who is. In fact, there's a part of me that wonders if he's not using this drawing to double for both the Book of Abraham and the Book of Breathings. It can work for both in the way he's, he's drawn it. I don't know, that's just a crazy theory I throw out there. That again, we can't.
[00:24:11] Speaker C: Well, it's crazy theory Neil has, he's pointed it off.
[00:24:14] Speaker D: He's actually, when I was after I read your article a couple months ago, I came to Stephen and I was like, do you think he might have been trying to draw something that could work for both the Book of Levi and the Book of Abraham. And so I. Hey, I'm not an Egyptologist, but I kind of.
Your own work kind of pointed me in that direction myself.
[00:24:33] Speaker B: It's just. There's so much about it that makes sense.
[00:24:36] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah, interesting.
[00:24:38] Speaker E: So let's talk about what his actual image is, because what we can see here from the surviving portion, there is stuff missing.
[00:24:48] Speaker A: And.
[00:24:49] Speaker E: And there's been some debate about exactly how that should be reconstructed. Obviously in facsimile one of the Book of Abraham, we have how Reuben Headlock.
[00:25:02] Speaker D: Presumably under Joseph Smith's direction.
[00:25:04] Speaker B: Joseph talks about giving him directions.
[00:25:05] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah.
[00:25:06] Speaker E: How that was reconstructed or how it was represented. And.
But then there have been Egyptological or.
[00:25:14] Speaker D: Attempts at Egyptological representations.
[00:25:17] Speaker E: I know, I can't remember whether it was the 60s or 70s, but Ed Ashman, who was.
[00:25:21] Speaker C: Yeah, let's pull up Ashman. This was. I think he published this for the 1970s. So this is a little grainy. This is what gets reproduced a lot, especially in anti Mormon publications. So this one's a little grainy, but.
[00:25:30] Speaker B: Let'S talk about it.
[00:25:31] Speaker D: I'll tell you right now. I saw some former members of the church arguing about the Book of Abraham using this representation.
Not two months ago, two or three months ago.
[00:25:41] Speaker A: It's alive and well.
[00:25:42] Speaker E: So.
[00:25:43] Speaker D: So even though it's an older one.
[00:25:44] Speaker E: We know it's still being used as a means of discrediting Joseph Smith's.
Joseph Smith's reconstruction or the. The reconstruction we use in the Book of Abraham.
[00:25:55] Speaker D: What are your thoughts as an Egyptologist on when you say this image?
[00:26:00] Speaker A: What are the differences between the two? So this is what someone reconstructed. There's gaps in the papyri. So Ed Ashman said, well, this is how it should be and this is our canonized version. So we've got like a man holding a knife and then there's a bird next to him at the head. Whereas this other reconstruction has anubis with a bird, like hovering over the person on the couch. And his hand gestures are different.
So that's kind of the discrepancy that like, okay, one person reconstructed this way. This is the way Joseph Smith put it in our pearl of great price. Who's right? What should it be?
[00:26:34] Speaker C: Should we throw up? Also the other one, just to make it more complicated, here's a third one. This came from an Egyptologist named Lanny Bell. This was an article in an Egyptological publication. He also sees the standing figures having a jackal head, but like Arphax in Li1, he has the figure on the lion couch, has two upraised hands and Anubis there or the figure, the jackal headed figure is holding some kind of a cup. Right.
So Kerry, walk us through. I don't know, Neil, what do you, how do you make sense of this? How do you make sense of this? Tell us which of these elements do you think is probably accurate, which is inaccurate?
[00:27:06] Speaker D: So I think that the question is when you're saying the picture that horror drew, what do you have in mind?
[00:27:13] Speaker E: What do you envision as an Egyptologist.
[00:27:15] Speaker C: Being the, the closest representation well, of this?
[00:27:18] Speaker B: So let's be clear, we can't know for sure but let's, let's go to the original papyrus that we have if it's okay.
[00:27:25] Speaker A: Got so many pictures. There we go.
[00:27:26] Speaker B: All right, so there are a couple of things that are worth considering here. One, you can see the glue marks that, that remain that go over the reconstructed head and down to about the middle of the torso of the person on the altar.
That as we look at all of the papyri, usually they were pretty careful about glue marks. We also can look at some of the other papyri and see that there are places where the papyrus was glued that now they're just flecks left. So we know some broke off after they glued it.
[00:27:57] Speaker D: In fact, the reason I understand it that they took these fragments and mounted them on paper is because they were fragile and things were starting to fall apart.
[00:28:05] Speaker B: That's the assumption. We don't know for sure.
[00:28:06] Speaker A: But I assume that when Joseph Smith received the papyri they may have had more of this papyrus there, at least of what the glue marks indicate. But later through time they've kind of disintegrated.
[00:28:17] Speaker B: That's the most likely assumption or the most likely scenario, I think, which is what I argue in that Egyptological article we spoke about. We don't know for sure, but those glue marks suggest that, that there was something there already that they saw it breaks off, but they know what it is to go along with that. And if we look at the reconstruction by Lanny Bell, who's an Egyptologist I respect, or by others, they are so holding the cup. The reason he's doing that is because we have a number of scenes that are somewhat similar where he's holding, it's really a bowl. But anyway, holding a bowl like that, again, remember that that's based on the assumption that this is going to be like other drawings. But we know that in so many cases it's not like other drawings that if I were. If I. If I said, okay, there was nothing left for Joseph Smith to see and there's no way that he knew what he was doing, then I would probably go, okay, what's the most common thing? Oh, that's it. And that's what Lanny Bell did, basically.
[00:29:18] Speaker E: So I. I do. Maybe. I don't know if this is appropriate.
[00:29:20] Speaker D: But maybe it is worth pausing that this is a common thing in other papyri. And the idea of an outstretched hand with a bowl or cup in its hand is interesting in light of Latter.
[00:29:33] Speaker E: Day Saint, of course, and worship.
[00:29:36] Speaker B: And we actually have lots of examples of that in temples where what they have is an incense ladle or spoon where they are holding it, but it's shaped like an arm with a cuptan that's holding the incense bowl. And Steven, you've done a paper.
[00:29:50] Speaker C: I published a paper on it.
[00:29:50] Speaker B: Yeah, that's exactly right.
[00:29:51] Speaker C: Show notes.
[00:29:52] Speaker B: That's exactly right. So, I mean, I wouldn't. That's. That's a plausible thing. The interesting thing to me is as we look at the. The part that if it was there, the part that's underneath the glue mark below the glue mark that possibly was there, that's where we're going to get whatever used to be in that hand.
[00:30:12] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:30:12] Speaker B: And the way we have it in facsimile one, so not in the vignette. It's missing in the vignette that we have now. Clearly something was drawn there originally.
It's a knife. And the shape of the knife is remarkably like what we know ritual flint knives were. So there are ritual knives that didn't change because they're a ritual. They are left over from back when flint was the best thing they could make knives of. Right. But because it's part of a ritual, you don't change ritual. So they can make better steel or, well, bronze and. And other metal knives after that. But for rituals, they keep using the flint knife because that's what they use and they look a lot like this. So Joseph Smith is either. If he's making that up, he's just darn lucky.
[00:30:57] Speaker C: So he got a flint knife that's being used in execration rituals. We have an execrative ritual element in Hoare's occupation.
From what you're saying and what I think we've talked about before, seems like the knife in facsimile 1 may be original to the scene.
[00:31:13] Speaker B: I think it is. There's a good case for that.
It is more likely that that's correct. Than that Joseph is that lucky of a guesser to get all of those elements. Right. Well, and just statistically it's better to say, oh, that's what it looked like and look, it's a. Below the glue mark. It probably was.
[00:31:29] Speaker E: So yeah, what you're saying is when Joseph Smith first got this papyri, what.
[00:31:34] Speaker D: Was in the hand was likely on the papyri.
[00:31:38] Speaker C: Corroborate that or apparently corroborate it with witnesses that seem to describe seeing the papyri where they mentioned the Henry Caswall, who's an anti Mormon by the way, he's not a friendly guy, he sees the papyri and he describes a standing figure holding a knife.
[00:31:51] Speaker D: Right.
[00:31:51] Speaker C: So we seem that code seems to corroborate from eyewitnesses the Egyptological evidence that the knife is original to this.
[00:31:57] Speaker E: I do think it's interesting we don't know who did the pencil drawing on this, but it is kind of interesting to me that the knife is not there.
[00:32:06] Speaker D: Whoever did it did not fill out that hand.
[00:32:09] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:32:09] Speaker E: Which is maybe again an indication that maybe at some point the knife was there in the hand.
[00:32:15] Speaker C: Now what about the hands? Let's talk about that for a second, Kerry, because in the Ed Ashman reconstruction, you've got one hand up to his face, but he decided to put in a bird. Right. Hovering over him. And so he sees that these are the ink strokes of the wing of the bird.
But Lanny Bell doesn't have that. He seems to see that. So he has two hands up to his face. What do we think is happening there?
[00:32:39] Speaker B: Lanny Bell does argue that based on, and I would agree that based on the remains of what we have, a bird doesn't work very well. I understand putting a bird there because in some somewhat similar scenes there's another bird and in some there's not. Right. So if you're just making stuff up, then that's a good thing to make up.
[00:32:54] Speaker E: And I do think I've seen some where the hand positions of the lying figure are similar to what we see there in the Ed Ashman.
[00:33:01] Speaker B: Yeah, that's exactly right.
[00:33:02] Speaker E: So it's not, you can understand where that idea might come from.
[00:33:07] Speaker B: He's looking at, at somewhat close parallels and trying to reconstruct.
[00:33:11] Speaker D: Right.
[00:33:12] Speaker B: But if you look carefully, it looks like it's, it's our fingers, not like a bird thing. And that's why Lanny Bell chose to reconstruct it and argued in his article that these were two hands that were up. Yeah. So I, I think that is again far more defensible than the bird, but we don't know for sure. Okay.
In any case, then I would also say let's move to the head. Discussing the head, the figure that Joseph Smith labels as a priest and whether it's supposed to be jackal headed or not. So jackal headed is usually associated with Anubis and Anubis is often associated with mummification scenes and scenes that are somewhat similar to this. So I can kind of understand that. Although John Gee and I actually found one time a jackal headed figure next to a mummified person on a beer on a papyrus in the university, the museum in Toledo.
And John just started reading, he's like, oh, that's, that's the God of human sacrifice. So anyway, because the tech I assumed it was Anubis, but as he was reading the text says it's the God of human sacrifice. So you have to be careful with any of these assumptions.
[00:34:18] Speaker D: So some of the, the iconography is sometimes is not always consistent.
[00:34:23] Speaker B: That's exactly right. People tend to assume it's always going to be the same way. And I'm going to say you can never assume it's always the same way in Egypt. And that's bad to say. Never, always at any time. Yeah.
So to me it's almost irrelevant.
Again, I suspect it's below the glue mark. I suspect they knew what it looked like and that they reconstructed it the way it looked as a person. But I don't know. In the end and to some degree it's irrelevant because what we know is that when these were rituals, they were priests that wore jackal heads or masks on their head. And we have examples of them where you can see where the shoulders went and where the little eye holes were. And I show them to my students and like, oh, how would anyone see out of that?
[00:35:07] Speaker C: Not very well. Which is why you sometimes have them. They're being led by another priest.
[00:35:10] Speaker B: That's exactly right.
[00:35:11] Speaker A: Don't miss.
[00:35:12] Speaker B: But one way or the other, it's a priest.
[00:35:14] Speaker D: Right.
[00:35:15] Speaker B: So whether it's a priest with a jackal mask on or a priest with a bald head, who cares?
[00:35:19] Speaker E: Well, and I was going to say.
[00:35:20] Speaker D: Again, not an Egyptologist, but when I googled lion couch scenes and looked at some of the ones that have Anubis in the it, he seems to be functioning in some sort of like priestly or kind of ritual enactment sort of way. Like it seems like if it's a mummy or, or whatever, he's the one Performing the ritual in the scene.
[00:35:42] Speaker B: It's a priest performing a ritual, no doubt. And in fact, many of the depictions, I would like to say most, but I haven't actually sat down and done statistical things, so I don't know. But many of the depictions were there in full color. Like this one is basically black and tan. Right? That's. That's the. The what the original is. But when you get depictions that are full color, they will usually draw the jackal head black, but the shoulders, arms, legs are the tan color that they use to depict Egyptian men. Egyptian men get a different color than anyone else. And that, again, makes it clear this is a human priest wearing a jackal mask. They are intentionally letting you know that's what it is. It's a priest. So it's a priest.
[00:36:20] Speaker C: The other indication that may be what he's wearing, and it's kind of hard to tell, but he could be wearing some sort of like a leopard skin.
[00:36:28] Speaker B: Pelt robe, it really looks like, which.
[00:36:30] Speaker C: Is there's a class of priests called the SEM Priests that wore that. And the myth behind the robe is that Horus, when he slew Seth, the agent of chaos and disorder, he was in the form of a lion when he. When he slew him and he took his pelt and he wore it as part of this sort of victory over chaos or whatever. So that's maybe speculative that it's possible.
[00:36:50] Speaker B: Yeah. And it's very common to have a priest in these scenes having a leopard skin. Yeah, that's. That's very common.
And that looks more.
As you just look at what's on the papyrus, it looks to me more likely to be a leopard skin than anything else.
[00:37:04] Speaker A: One thing I'm noticing between the canonized version and the pencil drawings on the papyri is that the head of that priest seems to be displaced a little bit more to the right. And it almost looks like. Is that like an arm he's raising? Do we know why these two drawings would be different between the canonizers and the pencil drawings? Who is making those pencil drawings?
[00:37:25] Speaker B: We don't know, but I think Reuben Hedlock was better at art than he was.
I think that's probably part of my. Although I do like, he looks like he's smiling at us. And that does make me happy.
[00:37:33] Speaker C: It's just a little blotchy there. It's. Yeah, we don't know. We assume a lot of people assume Joseph Smith was the one who directed it to be reconstructed this way.
But as we've discussed here we don't actually know the extent of those restorations, when they were done, who did them.
Certainly some of these elements, more likely than others, are restorations, like the head of the priest, but others appear to be original. So we just don't know for sure.
[00:37:58] Speaker A: The little I know of Egyptian iconography, it seems like whoever drew those pencils wasn't as familiar with Egyptian archaeology, since he's giving us a face on depiction instead of profile.
[00:38:07] Speaker E: Yeah. And that's one of the things I think is interesting, is the head of the priest.
I mean, if that was a reconstruction, they copied it maybe from the head of the figure lying down, but it.
[00:38:19] Speaker D: Looks like an Egyptian image. And from what I understand, Egyptian priests are often depicted as bald.
[00:38:27] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, yeah. They were to have no hair.
[00:38:29] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:38:30] Speaker E: So, again, if it's a reconstruction, it was a pretty good one.
[00:38:36] Speaker C: So let's talk about one last thing here with our facsimile one. Let's talk about the bird figure, one, which Joseph Smith identifies as the angel of the Lord. In the printed facsimile, the bird has a bird head, Appropriate enough, has a falcon head.
But in the original papyrus, if you kind of squint, it's cut off kind of halfway, you know, through the head. And so you can see, because it's cut off, different renderings or restorations give it a human head. Right.
So let's talk for just a minute here. This. This figure is commonly identified as a Ba, which is kind of a difficult.
[00:39:11] Speaker B: Egyptologically.
[00:39:12] Speaker C: Egyptologically, yeah. We'll identify as the Ba. I have some notes here on.
[00:39:16] Speaker B: The ba is drawn with a human head. And sometimes.
[00:39:19] Speaker C: Yes, is a. That's what I was gonna say.
Give us real quick. And then I have a good quote from a good Egyptological resource we can look at. But, Carrie, give us your approach on what is a Ba, what's going off the head.
How do you make sense of this?
[00:39:32] Speaker B: It is actually really difficult to explain what the different elements of a human are from an Egyptological point of view. But there are different parts of who you are, different components. The most common we talk about are the ka and the ba. And Egyptologically, people usually say the ka's like a life force or an energy or something like that. That and the ba is like your spirit. It's who you are. Sometimes people have conversations with their ba. Right.
So probably the simplest, and this is really simplifying, but the simplest and easiest thing we could do is it's usually associated with a spirit.
[00:40:05] Speaker C: Yeah. So it's a spirit Or a soul.
[00:40:08] Speaker B: Yeah, soul. That's probably the more common.
[00:40:11] Speaker D: So you say it can be like the spirit or soul of a person, but, like, do gods have BA's?
[00:40:18] Speaker C: Oh, yes, they do. Okay, so I have a great resource here.
It's a lexicon of Ptolemaic hieroglyphs with definitions of what they are. Right. And the entry under ba, there's multiple writings for it. Hieroglyphic writings. So including ones with human heads and ones with falcon heads.
[00:40:35] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:40:36] Speaker C: So just on that basis, you can't determine whether it has a human head or not because it's attested as both in the Ptolemaic period.
[00:40:42] Speaker D: Sure.
[00:40:43] Speaker C: But either way, let's assume. Who's to say? But either way, what is a Ba? This is the definition given in this lexicon.
The Ba of a God is a manifestation of divine power which enables the God to communicate with other beings and be manifest in them. The God is a visible, mobile aspect of divine power which exists at a supramundane level. And the Ba of a God can be perceived or felt in the mundane world. And they go on to say, for example, that the Ba of the God Horus provides a link between heaven and the temple of Horus at Edfu. So there's a temple link, but did you catch that? The manifestation of divine power which enables the God to communicate with other beings. What would we call that in a Christian context? In the context of Abraham being rescued from near sacrifice?
[00:41:32] Speaker D: Well, yeah. So angel. Right. Angel of the Lord versus Ba of the Lord, I guess you could say. But I'll tell you, this is just kind of a fun one. But what it kind of reminded me of as we were talking about is it's like your patronus. Right?
[00:41:47] Speaker B: There you go.
[00:41:49] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:41:49] Speaker B: Now, to further this, John G. Has actually shown that typically when you go from Egyptian to Coptic and then Greek, that the bob becomes angel. That's how it ends up being translated as this angel. So.
[00:42:03] Speaker C: Or sometimes assistant or helper.
[00:42:05] Speaker B: Yeah, helper or messenger, which is actually the word that is in Hebrew for it. Right. So it just.
Anyone who is telling you. Okay, that's problematic to think of it that way. Just hasn't done their homework. They don't know the whole story. It's their deep, dark secret that they didn't.
[00:42:22] Speaker C: Well, we've discussed all facsimile one. There's a lot more we could discuss. Maybe we'll give a shout out to our episode we did and provide a link where we went through facsimile one and two. But let's just kind of wrap this up here real quick with your final thoughts. Kerry on okay, so what with all this Egyptological stuff and all this, this weird esoteric Egyptian things, we've addressed many of the criticisms and questions people have. We've shown that the TikTok narrative of the Book of Abraham in Facsimile one is, shall I say, deficient in many ways and is leaving out a lot of details.
Just take a few minutes if you'd like carrion for your average Latter Day Saint viewing this. Who wants to study Facsimile one and wants to get something out of it. Could you, if I may, translate all this Egyptologies into a Latter Day Saint context to help us appreciate Facsimile one on its own?
[00:43:11] Speaker B: Yeah, I would love to. And I can't separate facsimile 1 from the text of the Book of Abraham because they're about the same thing. Right. But I think it's incredibly significant and we've talked about it a little bit already. But I want to tell you, or maybe phrase it in a way that can be meaningful for people personally.
Think again of the story of the Book of Abraham and especially this first part. Abraham, who has forsaken the world around him, the idolatry, even the idolatry of his family and so on. But in the end he has forsaken the world around him because he wants to have a greater relationship with God. And in doing so he receives persecution. There are difficult trials that come his way, but because he continues to pursue God in that way. And as I say this, I want us to think that in some ways, I mean, we've got the temple connections here. This is also what Horus is thinking of as he does execration and creation rites to get into the presence of God. Right? Right. It's that same story.
He continues to pursue having this relationship with God. As a result, God manifests himself to him, saves him from the terrors of the world, and allows he recreates Abraham as it were, recreates their relationship and does so in a covenant context. And then if we continue following that, he does that. And in chapter two, he not only establishes that covenant with Abraham, but he tells Abraham, go and give it to the entire world world. In chapter three, he basically tells us to the cosmos and shows how everyone who does so can approach him and come to be with him. And then he launches into recreation because that's what has to happen again and again and again for all of us to be born again. We could say, right, be recreated or born again. And it's tied with covenant. It's tied with our desire to approach God and his desire to be connected with us and come and deliver us. It is the most beautiful story. And it's amazing to me how in the Book of Abraham, we get a lot of personal, a global, and a cosmic level. God is really trying to tell us he wants with all of his children to be connected and to deliver them so that they can be with him in relationship with him.
[00:45:18] Speaker A: I'm getting tingles. That is so cool that I've never seen the facsimile in that light before. It's not just like illustrating a scene from the story Abraham's telling.
This is his, like, theophany with God. This is his covenant origin story that is tying in all these cool Egyptian elements of execration and sacrifice and destruction and recreate that. That's amazing.
[00:45:40] Speaker B: And if you think about it, every element I just talked about is in the temple. It is the temple story. Every element is in the temple, all of it. This is the grand story of our. Our journey to be with God again.
And it's told in such. I think the Book of Abraham may be the most beautiful. You have to kind of peel through all the layers, even in the text itself, to see that.
[00:46:00] Speaker C: That.
[00:46:00] Speaker B: But it may be the most beautiful expression of what God is trying to do with us and for us that I've ever seen anywhere.
[00:46:07] Speaker A: That's so cool.
If you guys want to dive into all of these cool little nuggets of inspiration, you really should check out. Let's talk about the Book of Abraham. This is obviously a very short, simplified form of many of the arguments with the Book of Abraham. How to understand it. You can get a deseret book, but you also should check out all the scholarship Kerry Muelstein has done, because it is vast and it is deep.
[00:46:30] Speaker D: Get the book and then go read the further readings as well.
[00:46:33] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:46:33] Speaker D: But yeah. Thank you so much, Carrie, for joining us today.
[00:46:37] Speaker B: It's my pleasure.
[00:46:39] Speaker A: The Book of Abraham is true. Guys, this is so awesome. I'm really on fire for some of these insights I have.
[00:46:44] Speaker D: And the scriptures are real.
[00:46:46] Speaker C: The scriptures are real.
[00:46:48] Speaker B: And we'll link or maybe re release that episode with us. Yeah. Yeah, great.
[00:46:52] Speaker A: The Scriptures are real. The church is true. And we will see you next time.
