Reformed Egyptian = Latin Short Hand? Celestial version

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_DrW
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Re: Reformed Egyptian = Latin Short Hand? Celestial version

Post by _DrW »

Nevo,

The mea culpa is below.

Chap wrote:Really? That is not for any of us to settle by simple declaration, at least not on the Celestial level at which this discussion is being conducted.

Nevo wrote:[I am sorry, Chap, but DrW's declaration that all of the Anthon transcript characters have been identified and that, moreover, they have all been identified as modern, is a whopper. Not only is it untrue, it is not even close to being true. You guys can't just make stuff up and pass it off as fact.

DrW wrote:Nevo,

Fair enough. I will take that as a reasonable CFR.

It may take some time to find the reference(s), but I have seen statements in the literature that they have all been identified (although I suppose that some may not agree with some of the matches).

I don't like being accused of telling whoppers (although given that I made the statement without providing the evidence, I suppose you were justified in doing so), so I will do my best to find the reference(s) this weekend and get back to you.
______________________
ETA: I did not say that the characters were all modern. I said that they were contemporary and non-ancient. What I should have made clear (and did not) is that they were contemporary with Joseph Smith in that they would have all been available for Joseph Smith to copy, miss-copy and possibly alter slightly.


So, here is the best that I could do in finding the reference I read a few years ago claiming that all of the Anthon Characters could be attributed to scripts that were used by Irish Catholic clergy from approximately the 8th Century up to approximately the 17th century and beyod.

The thread on which I first saw this information was on the old MADBoard. The author of the post in which it was contained was Arc. The thread in question was not preserved when MADB became MDD.

In commenting on the now flushed MADB thread on Nov 28, 2009, I wrote the following on another board.

I noted that DCP was on the "Reformed Egyptian" thread on MADB and responded to Arc's initial post identifying many of the script characters as Tironian notes. DCP asked Arc to identify the source of the rest of the characters in the Anthon Transcript (clearly assuming that he could not do so).

When Arc showed that they were an old form of Gaelic and Ogham code, DCP did not come back to the thread to defend Joseph Smith or the Church. An apologist guy named hagoth7 conveniently invited Arc to take up the discussion on another thread on another section of the board.

The fact that DCP did not come back with a response and some of the other TBM's acknowledged that the Anthon Transcript was indeed made up of characters in use by Irish Catholics in the 8th - 17 Century was very interesting.

Apologists could claim that there is no evidence that Stephen Mack had the facsimile or shared it with Joseph. But in the end it does not matter. The bottom line is that the Anthon Transcript, accepted by both the RLDS and LDS Churches as genuine, is comprised of characters that have nothing whatsoever to do with Egyptian, Reformed Egyptian, Hebrew, or any other Semitic language.

Like the Kinderhook plates, the Book of Abraham papyri and the Greek Psalter incident, this bit of research is more confirmation that Joseph Smith was con man and a fraud, plain and simple.

Here is the graphic from Arc's post.

Arc provided references. Since the MADB thread in is gone, I cannot find them again.

So, in fairness to Nevo, I will concede that I was wrong in stating that all of the Caractors had been identified without having had the reference at hand. I should have said that the majority of the Anthon characters have been identified.

I would add that whether all or simply the majority of the characters have been identified makes little difference to the argument that the Anthon Transcript is simply a collection of what Joseph Smith believed to be ancient and characters that were copied down and identified as "Reformed Egyptian" with the intent to commit fraud. Without invoking magic, there is no other possible explanation.
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_Nevo
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Re: Reformed Egyptian = Latin Short Hand? Celestial version

Post by _Nevo »

DrW wrote:Arc provided references. Since the MADB thread in is gone, I cannot find them again.

Well, I am quite certain that Arc's source was none other than the Richard Stout article linked at the start of this thread. Stout writes: "But in the dozen or so pre-19th century systems I did check, a majority of the symbols on the 'Anthon transcript' could be accounted for."

You evidently take that claim at face value. I do not. As I noted earlier in the thread, numerous others have claimed to find equally plausible connections to scripts ancient and modern. I could therefore say to you, with equal authority, that most of the characters have been identified as ancient. The fact is the characters have not been definitively identified. As far as I can tell, Stout hasn't even managed to convince fellow cryptology buffs of his findings (e.g., Nick Pelling) much less scholars of early Mormonism.

Dan Vogel, by the way, thinks "the characters Smith copied from the plates for Harris resembled Egyptian hieratic and demotic scripts—examples of which were available in Smith's day. Other symbols were different but bore enough resemblance to Old World characters to be noticed by the experts but different enough to be unreadable" (Vogel, Joseph Smith: The Making of a Prophet, 113).
_DrW
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Re: Reformed Egyptian = Latin Short Hand? Celestial version

Post by _DrW »

Nevo wrote:
DrW wrote:Arc provided references. Since the MADB thread in is gone, I cannot find them again.

Well, I am quite certain that Arc's source was none other than the Richard Stout article linked at the start of this thread. Stout writes: "But in the dozen or so pre-19th century systems I did check, a majority of the symbols on the 'Anthon transcript' could be accounted for."

You evidently take that claim at face value. I do not. As I noted earlier in the thread, numerous others have claimed to find equally plausible connections to scripts ancient and modern. I could therefore say to you, with equal authority, that most of the characters have been identified as ancient. The fact is the characters have not been definitively identified. As far as I can tell, Stout hasn't even managed to convince fellow cryptology buffs of his findings (e.g., Nick Pelling) much less scholars of early Mormonism.

Dan Vogel, by the way, thinks "the characters Smith copied from the plates for Harris resembled Egyptian hieratic and demotic scripts—examples of which were available in Smith's day. Other symbols were different but bore enough resemblance to Old World characters to be noticed by the experts but different enough to be unreadable" (Vogel, Joseph Smith: The Making of a Prophet, 113).

Nevo,

You are quite the gentleman.

If he were still here, DCP could learn something from you about apologetic courtesy and appropriate behavior when scoring points.
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Re: Reformed Egyptian = Latin Short Hand? Celestial version

Post by _MCB »

So, the question I ask, is if the Anthon Manuscript is a sample of Tironian notes, is it possible that if it were transcribed into our writing system, would it make any sense in any language? That would certainly be proof.
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_Equality
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Re: Reformed Egyptian = Latin Short Hand? Celestial version

Post by _Equality »

Bumping this thread after reading Stout's article today. I agree with the apologists that if we were talking only about "matches" between Anthon characters and characters cherry-picked from a set of some 12 or 13,000, Stout's findings would be interesting but not all that persuasive. That is, one could probably find similarities between the characters and many different scripts that have been used over the years. The persuasive power of Stout's argument, to me, came not just from the resemblance of so many of the Anthon characters to Tironian notae, ogham, and various shorthand scripts, but the tying of Smith to Stephen Mack, the Detroit Manuscript, and Dr. Mitchell. It was the weaving of all those things together that gives Stout's argument such explanatory force. The difficulty I see for the apologist is trying to take all the evidence as whole, rather than just attacking the script comparison.
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Re: Reformed Egyptian = Latin Short Hand? Celestial version

Post by _Equality »

Does anyone know if there have been any serious apologetic attempts to explain this in the last year?
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_Nevo
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Re: Reformed Egyptian = Latin Short Hand? Celestial version

Post by _Nevo »

Equality wrote:Does anyone know if there have been any serious apologetic attempts to explain this in the last year?

I don't know of any. I don't think Richard Stout is on the radar of most LDS apologists.
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Re: Reformed Egyptian = Latin Short Hand? Celestial version

Post by _moksha »

Image

Wonder what we could discover if this was superimposed on the Vern Holley Maps?
Might we find the location where both the fiery lizard and ancient Indian were guarding their treasure?
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Re: Reformed Egyptian = Latin Short Hand? Celestial version

Post by _grindael »

Equality wrote:Does anyone know if there have been any serious apologetic attempts to explain this in the last year?


I know of none. I am going to do a paper on this myself. One problem I have with Stout's article, is that he doesn't provide source pictures of where he gets the comparison Notae from. (The two side by side columns in the OP) I would like to see the originals, or a scanned page so that I could do the comparisons myself. I have looked at numerous books on Notae and find some similarities, but I have not had time to pursue this. For example, see these books,

http://archive.org/stream/introductiona ... 2/mode/2up

http://archive.org/stream/histoiredelas ... 7/mode/2up

http://archive.org/stream/palaeographia ... 0/mode/2up

http://archive.org/stream/palaeographia ... 4/mode/2up

I contacted Mr. Stout a few years ago, and wrote a blog piece that he wanted to proof read before I published it, and then he didn't like how I arranged it and broke off contact with me. He seemed very cranky to me. I still have the article, and perhaps I'll post it with his commentary.
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Re: Reformed Egyptian = Latin Short Hand? Celestial version

Post by _hagoth7 »

Equality wrote:Does anyone know if there have been any serious apologetic attempts to explain this in the last year?

This was addressed in some depth on mormondialogue.org in several threads in late 2009 and early 2010.

In short, Marcus Tullius Tiro who introduced Rome to the version of shorthand known as Tironian script was a contemporary of Hagoth. Evidence presented in the threads mentioned above suggest that the freed slave Tiro was part of the Nephite migrations into the ocean northward, some of which ended up in northern Europe. The chain of custody for Tiro suggests he was gifted to Cicero's brother as a slave during the Roman conquest of northern Europe under Julius Caesar, and shortly afterwards entered Cicero's service.
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