KEP Numeral Pronunciations

[EdGoble]

22 minutes ago, Robert F. Smith said:

I have no idea what you believe, but I am certain that you don't know how to express it (whatever it is).

Then what would you have me do, having rewritten it 50 times in various ways?

[EdGoble]

3 minutes ago, Robert F. Smith said:

Peer review serves the notion  that scholarship is a communal endeavor, and  that we keep each other honest.  I've had plenty of rejections, and have tried to learn something from them.

You might want to prepare a colorful Power Point presentation, and see if that stirs the pot. If you are trying to do something as revolutionary as Moran & Kelley, The Alphabet and Ancient Calendar Signs, that may be the best way to handle it.

Well, yes, I would say so, but...

Actually, ironically, it is my reverse engineering of the Lunar Zodiac Constellations using the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet that is that revolutionary, that uses Moran and Kelley.  It actually fulfills what Moran and Kelley and Cyrus Gordon set out to do.  That is a core piece of my argument on the Book of Abraham actually.

[MormonMason]

On 3/16/2018 at 1:42 PM, EdGoble said:

Actually, on the one hand, Kerry Muhlstien and Gee claim one mathematical methodology, while Smith and Cook claim another to determine scroll size.  This is a toss-up.  Neither one can be considered definitive until someone with math credentials can weigh in to break the tie.

The formula of Smith-Cook was tested on a papyrus scroll missing its end.  It showed the scroll was shorter than it really was.  It consistently calculated real scrolls shorter than they really were.

The problem with the formula Gee used was that it was not designed for a scroll missing a middle section.  It works fine on a scroll that has its middle but is missing its end, and is more accurate.  But if an uncertain amount of middle section is missing it makes a scroll impossibly longer.

From what I've seen, and through a preliminary, unpublished formula I saw a few years ago, the Horos scroll was between 15 and just under 21 feet long.  It couldn't have been more than 21 feet in length.  That also matches an eyewitness account that has it extend through two rooms of the Nauvoo Mansion House.

A Book of Breathings scroll is nowhere near that length.  The shortest I've seen is just over a couple feet long and the longest is just under eight feet in length.  Eyewitness accounts combined all evidence a long scroll filled with writing that could be unrolled across the floor of two rooms.  After much of the Book of Breathings was separated from the scroll and mounted under glass, the separate roll continued to be identified as the Book of Abraham.

So, if eight feet is the limit, and the limit of length for the kind of Book of Breathings Joseph Smith owned was about 5.5 feet, what was on the rest? The current Book of Abraham would take up about five feet of papyrus so there was plenty of room for it.

That is part of the reason why both Gee and myself and others think the Book of Abraham was attached to the end of the Book of Breathings scroll.

[Robert F. Smith]

7 minutes ago, MormonMason said:

..............................................So, if eight feet is the limit, and the limit of length for the kind of Book of Breathings Joseph Smith owned was about 5.5 feet, what was on the rest? The current Book of Abraham would take up about five feet of papyrus so there was plenty of room for it.

That is part of the reason why both Gee and myself and others think the Book of Abraham was attached to the end of the Book of Breathings scroll.

Since disparate Egyptian texts were often placed on a single papyrus, this makes perfectly good sense:  As A. Szczudlowska’s study makes clear, during New Kingdom and even Roman times, texts of the Old Kingdom were recopied and attached to copies of the Book of the Dead spells, e.g., BD 112, 128, 178, etc.  Pyramid Texts were even copied on coffin lids in the Saitic period (26th Dyn.) and later.  Miriam Lichtheim provides another example in noting that the hieroglyphic Book of the Dead Papyrus of Tentruty (Papyrus Berlin 3008 of the Ptolemaic period) contained a hieratic appendix of “The Lamentations of Isis and Nephthys,” which was “adapted to the use of an individual person.”  Ed Ashment correctly makes the point that Egyptian Magical Papyrus 8.8, which contains the name Abraham (ABRAHME/ABRACAM), “seems to have been used as a magical representational device in connection with certain magical spells.”  In another case, found in 1896 in the Middle Kingdom Theban tomb of a lector-priest, were three magical papyri “which were written on the back of old military dispatches.”  Indeed, “John Gee estimates that about 40% of known Sensen texts have other texts attached to them.”  Just so, papyri (such as the Westcar Papyrus [Papyrus Berlin 3033]) were applied to a variety of contexts, and were simply reused as palimpsests when necessary!