Part 11 - Reformed Egyptian

There are two passages in the Book of Mormon that imply a Nephite-Egyptian connection.  The first one is in 1 Nephi 1:2 where Nephi explains the record he engraved on gold plates was written in Egyptian, but based on Jewish knowledge.

Yea, I make a record in the language of my father, which consists of the learning of the Jews and the language of the Egyptians.

The other passage is in Mormon 9:32 where Moroni explains that the written Egyptian language had been altered by the Nephites.  This is the only passage in the Book of Mormon that uses the term "Reformed Egyptian"

And now, behold, we have written this record according to our knowledge, in the characters which are called among us the reformed Egyptian, being handed down and altered by us, according to our manner of speech.

In the very next passage, Moroni explains the justification for writing in Egyptian rather than Hebrew as well as why the Nephite record contained imperfections.

And if our plates had been sufficiently large we should have written in Hebrew; but the Hebrew hath been altered by us also; and if we could have written in Hebrew, behold, ye would have had no imperfection in our record.

There are two points I want to explore regarding this Nephite-Egyptian connection.  The first point is that archeological artifacts connecting ancient America with Egypt would support Book of Mormon historicity claims.  The second is that Egyptian writing should be more concise than Hebrew for Moroni's justification for the use of Egyptian on the gold plates to make any sense.

While the failure to find Egyptian-like artifacts in the Americas does not by itself disprove the historicity of the Book of Mormon, such finds would be very welcome to Mormon apologists and believers in Book of Mormon historicity.  No connections have yet been found.  An internet search turns up only message board discussions and highly spurious articles.  Mormon apologetic sites do not display any solid evidence of an American-Egyptian connection either.  Any such finds would immediately jump to the top of their evidence lists rather than the NIHM inscription I discussed in part 6 of this series.

My second point turns out to be even more damaging to Book of Mormon historicity claims.  When the Book of Mormon was written, it was widely believed that Egyptian hieroglyphs were pictographic, meaning that a single symbol represented an idea worth many words.  This assumption makes sense of Moroni's justification for using Egyptian because of limited space on the gold plates.

The discovery of the Rosetta stone by Napoleon's army in 1799 provided the key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics.  The stone contained the same text in three languages: Greek, Demotic, and hieroglyphics.  The deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphics turned out to be much more difficult than expected because there was not a simple correlation.  Therefore, the ability to read hieroglyphics was not mastered until the mid 19th century, well after the publication of the Book of Mormon.  More information can be found in this article.

It turns out that hieroglyphics are not strictly pictographic but have phonetic elements as well.  Furthermore, hieroglyphic writing is often redundant in order to reduce ambiguity.  This is a rather technical subject that I do not wish to cover in great detail.  More information is available in this article.  The main point I am making is that the use of Egyptian rather than Hebrew would not have resulted in any appreciable space savings on the gold plates, making Moroni's explanation meaningless.  In other words, statements about Egyptian in the Book of Mormon represent early 19th century misconceptions rather than the knowledge of an ancient writer who actually knew how to write ancient Egyptian.