In Joseph Smith’s journal, an entry dated October 1, 1835 reads as follows:

This after noon labored on the Egyptian alphabet, in company with brs O. Cowdery and W. W. Phelps. The system of astronomy was unfolded.

I love Joseph’s casual and nonchalant attitude toward a subject that most would consider highly complex and enigmatic. The world’s brightest minds have spent years trying to make sense of Egyptian language, theology, and cosmology. But Joseph had no need for formal education or a Rosetta Stone. He worked it all out on a Thursday afternoon. Of course, I’m exaggerating a bit. He had begun the process in the summer of 1835. But there is a stark contrast between academic research and pure revelation.

My interest in Joseph’s approach to Egyptology, as with just about every other topic I have covered on this blog, began with simple curiosity. After examining the name Olishem, I wondered if I could figure out the meaning of Oliblish and Enish-go-on-dosh—astronomical terms found in Facsimile 2 of the book of Abraham. This led me to a document from the Kirtland Egyptian Papers entitled “Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language.” From here on out, I will refer to this text as the GAEL.

When I come across strange words and names in the scriptures, I get excited, because I see this as an opportunity to solve a puzzle and learn something new. As I look through the GAEL, I am like a kid in a candy store, because it contains page after page of weird words, such as Zubzooloan, Crash-ma-kraw, Slundlo, Ear-roam and Hoeoophahphaheh. It purports to be a kind of glossary of key Egyptian terms, and it includes explanations of grammatical principles. The second half provides information about astronomy which seems at least loosely related to certain details in the book of Abraham.

But before diving into this text, we ought to ask ourselves: is it even inspired? Many Latter-day Saint scholars and apologists do not believe that it is. That’s because it looks like complete gibberish. The language described bears almost no resemblance to Egyptian, or any other language for that matter (with the exception of a few Hebrew and Greek words). What is the relationship between the GAEL and the book of Abraham? Was Joseph Smith involved in its production? I have found that most believing scholars are not willing to touch the subject or make any kind of firm statement. The official position of FairMormon is that we don’t know and that “it would be foolish to jump to conclusions before all the relevant data is presented for scholarly scrutiny.” Even Hugh Nibley, whom I respect, tried to distance Joseph Smith from the Egyptian grammar, arguing that it was a crude attempt by Joseph’s followers to imitate his spiritual gifts.

I suppose that many of the readers who find my articles online are simply looking for information that could help bolster their fragile faith. In discussing difficult and sensitive topics, there is a danger of inadvertently drawing attention to problems that believers were previously unaware of. If the explanation to such problems is unsatisfactory, then the reader is left worse off than before. I apologize if I have ever affected anyone in this way, but my attitude is that we ought to shine a light on difficult issues and try to see things as clearly as possible. So read on at your own risk. In this post, we are going to look at how the sausage gets made.

Let me be upfront and honest. If I discovered through my study that Joseph Smith was not a prophet, I would not hesitate to accept that conclusion and leave the Church. In many ways, that would make my life easier. I don’t need the restored gospel to be true. But everything I have learned has confirmed to me that Joseph’s gifts were real. Furthermore, I have had personal experience receiving inspiration, and I cannot deny this. God has shown himself willing to answer every question that I have, line upon line, and he usually gives me far more than I ask for. I am beyond doubt at this point, and this gives me the confidence to boldly go where no one has gone before.

The “Translation” Process

Despite my testimony, I have to admit that outwardly, the book of Abraham looks really bad. Joseph Smith gets a hold of some mummies and papyrus rolls. He translates the Egyptian text and offers interpretations of the illustrations. But everything is wrong. We have the papyrus fragments, and the translation doesn’t match the original text.

A common explanation I have heard is that Joseph translated from papyri that have since been lost. It bothers me that this myth continues to be perpetuated. Now that I have taken a closer look at the GAEL and the book of Abraham transcripts, I know that this is not true. The Church is in possession of the document that was used to translate the book of Abraham. It is known as the Small Sensen papyrus.

Joseph translated from this document starting at the top, reading from right to left (which, incidentally, is the correct way to read the text). Evidently the papyrus was damaged sometime after 1835, so some of the characters are missing, but the majority are still there. In the transcripts of the book of Abraham, hieratic characters are written in the left margin, and the translation is on the right.

Hieratic portions 18 and 19, corresponding to Abraham 1:31-2:1

The first two characters are even labelled with superscript numbers 1 and 2 with corresponding numbers in the text, leaving us with little doubt that the text and the characters were intended to go together.

The writing on the papyrus is a portion of a funeral text called the Book of Breathings (Sensen), which should be rendered as follows:

[Osiris shall be brought in]to the great pool of Khonsu, and likewise [the Osiris Hor, justified] born of Taykhebyt, justified, after his two hands have been clasped to his heart. The Document of Breathing which [Isis] made shall [also] be buried, which is written on both the inside and outside of it, [and wrapped] in royal linen, being placed [under] his left arm near his heart, while the bearer of his coffin works on its outside. If this book is made for him, then he will breathe like the souls of the gods forever and ever. (Michael Rhodes translation)

From the GAEL, we learn that there is a correlation between the proposed translation of characters from the Sensen papyrus and the text of the book of Abraham. It is explained that the first character has something to do with Chaldea, and the first sentence in the book of Abraham speaks of the “land of the Chaldeans.” It could be argued that Joseph Smith’s followers took the inspired text of the book of Abraham and tried to work out the meaning of the characters through reverse engineering. But Joseph’s journal entry suggests that he was directly involved in the production of the GAEL. It seems clear to me that working on the GAEL was part of the translation process.

The entire book of Abraham comes from just a handful of Egyptian characters. Did Joseph Smith honestly believe that the translation of a single hieratic character could result in a paragraph of text? According to the GAEL, he probably did. It says that each character has multiple connecting parts of speech. The default value is five, but if the character has a line over it, the number of connecting words is increased to 5×5 (25). Two lines increases the number to 125 (5x5x5) and three lines results in 625 connecting words. We are informed that “in translating this chara[c]ter, this subject must be continued until there are as many of these connecting parts of speech used as there are connections or connecting parts found in the character.”

A few out-of-the-mainstream commentators such as Ed Goble and Vincent Coon have proposed that the book of Abraham was never intended to be a word-for-word translation. They see it as a kind of acrostic, a pattern found in some of the psalms in the Hebrew Bible. A 1993 book by Joe Sampson sees esoteric meaning in individual characters and relates this to the Jewish mystical tradition known as Kabbalah.

But if we’re going to apply Occam’s razor, the simplest and most obvious explanation is that Joseph Smith made up the book of Abraham. The situation reminds me of the movie 12 Angry Men. At first it seems like an open-and-shut case. Joseph is obviously guilty, and there is nothing to talk about. But little by little, reasonable doubts arise. Eventually, after all the pieces of evidence are considered, we realize that we must reject the null hypothesis.

Even if I set aside personal revelation and apply only rational thought, I must acknowledge that the text of the book of Abraham is genuinely ancient. This is because the content is consistent with traditions concerning Abraham and pseudepigraphal texts. The attempt on Abraham’s life, his knowledge of astronomy, his idolatrous father—these and many other details fit with what is known about Abraham, and Joseph Smith would have to have been more than a genius to synthesize them all. When you add in wordplay, parallelism, and an ancient astronomical model, the case becomes quite compelling.

But if the book of Abraham is true, and I have no doubt that it is, what do we make of the “translation” process? This is what I wanted to better understand. Specifically I wanted to know where to draw the line between what is inspired and what is not. In case you haven’t guessed already, I believe that the GAEL is inspired. In fact I am quite certain. But initially, I didn’t have a strong opinion one way or the other. I was open to the possibility that as part of the revelatory process, Joseph needed to make some efforts on his own in order to get the juices flowing.

Regular readers of this blog should know that I value independence of thought and despise groupthink. I call it as I see it, and I come to my own conclusions. The results of my study may be mainstream or on the fringe, reasonable or outlandish. It doesn’t matter to me. I simply want to know what is true. So I decided to just look at the GAEL to make an assessment for myself and to see if anything seemed interesting. What I found was more startling than I could have imagined.

Observations

One of the first things I noticed about the GAEL is that it is internally consistent. For example, the phrase zipzi iata veh is translated as “I saw five women.” The document explains elsewhere that iata means “to see” and zipzi means “women.” The word veh, therefore, must mean “five.” Veh is not translated in the GAEL, but a separate document labelled “Egyptian Counting” lists out the various numbers. This numbering system is completely unrelated to that of the Egyptians, but it does say that veh is the number five. Other terms are likewise consistent in meaning wherever they are found.

Despite the strangeness of the words, I found that it didn’t take me long to see a kind of logic in the way they fit together. A complex grammatical structure is detailed with precision. One section seems to describe a relatively advanced linguistic concept called valency, which I will explain later. Obviously none of this proves that the GAEL wasn’t a product of Joseph’s imagination. This could be a constructed language like Elvish or Klingon. But my point is that if the language was invented, Joseph Smith would have to have been a highly creative person like J.R.R. Tolkien. The system is well-thought-out and could not have been made up on the fly.

Something else I noticed is that the Egyptian hieratic characters are treated as compound ideographs. Two of the characters are shown in their “dissected” form, with constituent parts identified. Each piece can stand alone, having its own name and meaning. Individual words can be combined with other words to form new words. This is a big deal, because the only language I know of that functions in this way is Chinese. Also, the description of parts having a relationship to the whole seemed eerily similar to something that I had written previously.

As I dug in, I realized that certain ideas are implied but not stated explicitly. For example, the first character from the papyrus is introduced as za-ki-oan-hiash, or, alternatively, chal-sidon-hiash. It wasn’t obvious to me at first, but a statement later in the document helped me understand that this word is meant to be the source for Chaldea. (A separate document in the Kirtland Egyptian Papers confirms that this word refers to the “land of the Chaldeans.”) So basically, we are given an etymology that was previously unknown. If true, this could explain the difference between the Akkadian kaldu and the Hebrew kasdim. Both derive from kalsidonhiash.

A similar example is the term iota toues zipzi. At first I thought this was a sentence, but later I realized that it is a single word meaning “Egypt.” Iota means “see,” toues means “under” or “underwater,” and zipzi means “woman.” We are informed in the book of Abraham that Egypt was discovered by a woman, and when she first saw it, it was underwater. It dawned on me that we are meant to understand something: zipzi or tsiptsi is the source for the name Egypt. Zipzi resembles the English word gypsy, which derives from gypcyan (Egyptian). It is possible that Semitic people interpreted the initial consonant as a gimel, which some dialects pronounced as a hard g or k, resulting in the root kpt or kft. Also significant is the fact that the Egyptians defined their nation in the same way. In my post about Cumorah, I mentioned that the Egyptians referred to their homeland as the land of water (mer), i.e. the land of the Nile flood. The words are different but the meaning is the same.

The GAEL categorizes the “Egyptian” words according to a curious system of degrees. The first section is the 5th degree, and the next is the 4th, then 3rd, 2nd and 1st. Each section includes the same set of words, so we end up getting multiple definitions of the same word. Sometimes the definitions are the same; sometimes they are slightly different. After the five repetitive sections there is another set of words labelled “Second part 5th Degree,” which is followed by “Second part 4th Degree” and so on until the 1st degree again.

I scanned through the various words to see if I could find something verifiable that would tie back to a known language. A few words were familiar. Iota is a Greek letter, beth (defined as a place or residence) is the Hebrew word for “house,” and hahdees (described as a place of wickedness) resembles Hades, the Greek underworld. I was not particularly interested in these words, because I figured that Joseph Smith may have already been aware of them.

For some reason, I stopped when I got to the word Flos-isis. This is an astronomical term that occurs in the second half of the GAEL. It refers to the sun in a kind of esoteric way.

5th degree: The highest degree of light, be cause its component parts are light. The gover[n]ing principle of light Because God has said Let this be the centre for light, and let there be bounds that it may not pass… 4th degree: The night degree of light— the cheering the face of Millions of planets 3rd degree: The sun in its affinity with Earth and Moon— signifying their revolutions showing the power, the one has with the other. 2nd degree: The King of day or the central moving planet, from which the other governing moving planets receive their light.— having a less motion— slow in its motion— The earth’s chief Joy. 1st degree: The King of day. or central moving planet, from which, those other gove[rn]ing moving planets receive their light.

I was struck by the sun’s connection to happiness. Flos is a Latin word meaning “bloom” or “the best part,” as in the prime of one’s life. Flos also resembles the Latin felicitas or felix (“happy, blessed”), which is the basis for the word felicity. In addition, felis means “cat,” and in ancient Egypt, cats were associated with the sun god Ra. I began to wonder if there is a connection between animals, happiness, and the sun. That’s when I remembered a verse from the Doctrine and Covenants.

Q. Are the four beasts limited to individual beasts, or do they represent classes or orders? A. They are limited to four individual beasts, which were shown to John, to represent the glory of the classes of beings in their destined order or sphere of creation, in the enjoyment of their eternal felicity. (D&C 77:3)

I studied and pondered this for a few days, and that’s when I began to feel inspiration flowing into my mind in a familiar and unmistakable way. I understood intuitively what Flos-isis means. I will elaborate in a future post, but for now it suffices to say that from this point on, I began to take Joseph’s Egyptian alphabet seriously. Even though I didn’t understand everything, I knew that the GAEL was worth exploring.

If Not Egyptian, Then What?

There is no question that the words described in the GAEL and related documents are not Egyptian. But if the words are not invented, then we should be able to classify the language. I’m surprised that Latter-day Saint scholars have not really addressed the fact that Joseph Smith claimed to translate Egyptian papyri, but the translation he produced contains Semitic words like kokob (“star”) and shamayim (“heaven”). Kolob is a real word, but it is not Egyptian. It is related to the Arabic qalb (“heart”) and the Hebrew qarab (“to come near”).

It seems that the book of Abraham conveys the story of Abraham from the perspective of Abraham’s own culture and language. But what was his native language? At that time, the Hebrew language had not yet developed. Scholars believe that the Chaldeans spoke a West Semitic language similar to Aramaic. But the language in the GAEL is not Semitic either. In my previous post, I made the rather bold claim that the Chaldeans were related to the Gauls or Celts, who were Indo-European. I have concluded that some of the names in the book of Abraham, such as Shagreel, Kahleenos, Olishem, and Oliblish, are actually Indo-European words.

I believe that the original homeland of the Chaldeans was in Asia Minor near the Black Sea. A city near Istanbul was called Chalcedon. A province in the Byzantine Empire located in the southeast corner of the Black Sea was called Chaldia. The major city there, Trabzon (or Trabezus), was an important stop along the Silk Road. It was a place where many different cultures and languages converged. This makes it difficult to trace the origins and evolution of Abraham’s language.

Though I’m not an expert in historical linguistics, I did learn a thing or two during my undergraduate years at BYU. One thing I know is that the vocabulary of a given language can sometimes disguise the original source of that language. For example, English has a preponderance of Latin-based words. This is due to the Norman conquest in the 11th century AD. But English does not derive directly from Latin, and it is not part of the Romance category of languages. Looking at the core vocabulary and grammatical structure, we can see that it is actually a Germanic language. Similarly, Hungarian outwardly looks like a language isolate. But a handful of the most basic terms resemble Finnish words, letting us know that Hungarian belongs in the Finno-Ugric language group.

Languages, like sponges, absorb the qualities of their surroundings. It seems clear that Chaldean evolved into a Semitic language, but I began to theorize that it was originally something else. I figured that beneath the Semitic exterior, Chaldean could have been Indo-European, Hurro-Urartian, or Kartvelian.

I knew that in order to identify a plausible connection, I would have to find affinities in the core vocabulary and grammatical structure. This seemed like a very difficult task, because the words in the GAEL don’t seem to resemble anything, and I didn’t have the time to dig through numerous obscure or extinct languages. Plus, as I mentioned before, the grammar in the GAEL is especially unusual, the closest parallel being Chinese.

Then I remembered that Joseph Smith and his associates left us with a potentially useful resource: the Egyptian Counting document. I figured that if this was a real language, then the numbers would reveal the truth. It is very easy to look up numbers and make comparisons across languages.

In this document, we find a fairly standard base 10 numbering system. The characters are not far off from the Hindu-Arabic numerals that we use today. When I compared the numbers to known languages, it was plainly obvious that the numbers six through ten are Indo-European. The numbers across all the languages in this family tend to be very similar.

The numbers one through five, however, do not resemble those in Indo-European languages. This tells us something important. The language was strongly influenced by the Indo-Europeans, but it was not originally Indo-European. The situation reminds me of the fact that in Uralic languages, numbers only go up to six natively. Seven through nine are borrowed. This suggests that those people originally used a base 6 (or possibly 60) system and later adapted it. But in the case of the “Egyptian Counting,” the linguistic clues point to a prior base 5 system. This is quite rare, but it would be consistent with the system of five degrees/valence levels described in the GAEL.

The numbers four (teh) and five (veh) are harder to place. Veh looks like it might fit in the Uralic family, and the closest match to teh is probably the Old Turkic tört. But what intrigues me the most are the numbers one through three, which can be easily classified. The language family is Sino-Tibetan. If we zero in on the Wu dialects, which are spoken in and around Shanghai, we find an almost perfect match.

This is obviously quite shocking. But there are a few reasons why I am prepared to accept the possibility that Abraham’s language was related to Chinese. Ever since I wrote my article about the name Zion, I have picked up on clues that point to a distant relationship between Hebrew, Egyptian, and the languages of East Asia. We know that relatives of the Celts lived in the Tarim basin in China and spoke an Indo-European language (Tocharian). Plus, when I wrote about the Adamic language, I concluded, based on the patterns I had observed in the scriptures, that the structure of that language must have been similar to Chinese. The GAEL is the missing link, bridging gaps across time and space. As I look through it, I feel like a scientist who has discovered the real-world existence of a theoretical particle.

At this point, I began to feel more confident (though far from certain) that the GAEL describes a real language. But the words in this document seemed unrelated to the Egyptian characters in the Sensen papyrus. My initial working hypothesis was that Joseph’s “translation” was inspired, but his interpretation of the Egyptian characters was incorrect. In other words, he thought he was translating, but what he produced was actually revealed. Just to make sure, however, I decided to look at the character explanations in the GAEL to see if anything might actually be right. That’s when I noticed something that gave me chills.

Character labeled “zakionhiash” (left) alongside examples of the reed leaf from Georg Möller’s list of hieratic characters

The first character that was copied from the Sensen papyrus is the hieratic version of the reed leaf hieroglyph. (Identification of the characters is aided by the fact that scholars have been able to reconstruct the missing portions of the papyrus.) When I thought about this, I remembered that I had written about the reed leaf several months ago in a post entitled “The Hand of God.” In this article, I shared something that I had learned by pure inspiration. The phoneme y or ia was anciently regarded as an indication of transcendence. When it occurred in the middle of a word, this symbolized immanence, which is the idea that divinity permeates the mundane. I knew this was true, even though I couldn’t prove it. The deeper meaning was known to the authors of the Book of Mormon, who associated proper names containing this sound (such as Morianton, Teancum, etc.) with the word “exceedingly.”

In Hebrew, the y sound is represented by the letter yod (equivalent to the Greek iota), which is a small dot or apostrophe. In ancient Egyptian, the equivalent sound was represented by the reed leaf. So it’s interesting to note that in the GAEL, the explanation of the reed leaf character says that one of its subcomponents is a small dot called iota. This in itself is remarkable, because it shows that Joseph was able to correctly link the character with its phonetic value. How could he have known?

There’s more. The explanation in the GAEL also says that iota, when combined with another subcomponent, beth, results in a new word called bethka. This word was added to the document later, after all the other terms in the first set had already been written. The scribe put it at the end of each section, saying that “this should be inserted between iota and zub-zool-oan.” Beth is defined as a “place of happiness,” but when iota is added, the word becomes a bit more transcendent.

Bethka — the greatest place of happiness exceeding extending beyond any thing…

When the full implications of this became clear to me, I was completely stunned. Besides confirming that what I had written months ago was true, I now had concrete, tangible evidence that Joseph’s Egyptian alphabet was inspired. Though this evidence is not something that can persuade anyone other than myself, I knew at that point that I had been given a personal, undeniable witness.

I had set out at the beginning to determine what is inspired and what is not. What I learned defied my expectations. Not only are the strange words real, but I have to acknowledge that Joseph was able to correctly interpret the characters on the papyrus. In other words, it’s true. All of it.

The book of Abraham is not a traditional or literal translation. But it is, nonetheless, correct, because it taps into a deeper level of meaning hidden within individual characters. To the rational mind, this is hard to accept. But the restored gospel presents us with many things that defy logic.

A Rational Basis for Esoteric Language

The second character copied from the papyrus appears to be the rope coil hieroglyph (Z7). This character has a phonetic value of w or u (equivalent to the Hebrew letter vav). Another Egyptian character with the same phonetic value is the quail chick (G43).

According to the GAEL, the rope coil represents the word Ah-brah-oam, i.e. Abraham. This word is further defined using phrases which include “rightful heir” and “father of many nations.” If this definition is accurate, then the character must be more than a simple phoneme. There must be a deeper meaning that relates in some way to the name Abraham.

Curiously, the rope coil is a subcomponent in the next group of characters, which includes the coil and bolt hieroglyph (V2). Joseph Smith seems to have picked up on this, because the next character in the GAEL is called Kiah-brah-oam. The definition of this word is similar to that of Ah-brah-oam, and we are also informed that it is equivalent to zub-zool-oan (I will explain why in just a bit).

Initially, I wondered if Jewish mysticists had something interesting to say about the letter vav, but I did not find anything that was particularly useful. After pondering this issue for awhile, I eventually realized that I would never solve the problem by reading about it. I knew that if I was ever going to find an answer, it would be through pure inspiration. As soon as I understood this, I remembered that I had already written about the letter vav. It came up when I was writing about the shapeshifting Mahujah/Mahijah, and also in my post about Mulek. Vav represents the number six.

I thought to myself, “If I had to define this character with a single word, what would it be?” Setting aside all rational thought, I realized that I already knew the answer: potentiality. Vav is a trickster and a deceptive hook because its form is not yet defined. It is immature, like an unripe fig or a quail chick. Like a coiled rope, its power has not yet been released.

Feeling confident about this esoteric meaning, I looked through the GAEL to see if I could find anything to back up the idea. That’s when things that were not obvious to me before started to make sense. Digging into the subcomponents of zub-zool-oan, we find phrases like “coming down from the beginning” and “right by birth.” (Incidentally, all these phrases strongly correlate with the text in Abraham 1:1-4). In other words, Abraham’s name signifies one who was foreordained—chosen before he was born—to be a great leader. He is like a seed that is pregnant with unfulfilled possibilities.

Zub-zool — From the beginning of the creation until now; pointing out or designating at the present time; having foreordained, or decreed or having before seen; For instance: Abraham having been chosen before was sent by commandment into the Land of Canaan: Having preached the gospel unto the heathen, was forewarned of God to go down into Ah-meh-strah, or Egypt, and preach the gospel [to the] Ah-meh-strah-ans;

So I found an answer that satisfied my curiosity. But I realized that it would be very difficult for me to find anything that would persuade others who are still skeptical. The truth of the matter is that things which are inspired can only be discerned by inspiration. Testimonies are non-transferable. Scholars and apologists try to paint the restored gospel as being reasonable and plausible. But there is nothing normal about it. Joseph Smith translated gold plates that he got from an angel using a seer stone, for crying out loud. It’s downright crazy, but it also happens to be true. Some things can only be perceived by entering the realm of irrationality.

If I wanted to, I could go through all the characters on the Sensen papyrus and try to find hidden meanings that relate to the text in the book of Abraham. But I feel like that would be a waste of time. I might be able to learn some things, but all of it would be speculative and none of it would be provable. I like to follow the 80/20 rule and focus my attention on the few things that produce big results.

Let us take a step back and consider the implications of what I have shared so far. Today, we assume that characters or letters of the alphabet are the smallest units of language. You can’t get any smaller than individual phonemes. It is believed that the letters we use today evolved from pictographs. But what we learn from the GAEL is that Egyptian characters have subcomponents. These subcomponents are sometimes more easily seen in the hieratic versions of the characters, rather than the stylized hieroglyphs. It’s like zooming in to the atomic level and discovering that atoms are composed of protons, neutrons, and electrons, and that those particles are composed of quarks, etc.

This is a fractal approach to language, with the structure of the parts being similar to that of the whole. In this kind of system, it is hard to differentiate words from sentences or paragraphs. A single sentence could conceal another level of meaning. In some ways, this is already apparent in Egyptian. Many characters are both logograms and phonograms, so they can be read in more ways than one. The writing is often redundant, with multiple characters clustered together. As I mentioned when writing about Kahleenos, it has long been believed that hieroglyphs carry some kind of esoteric meaning. Jewish Kabbalists likewise see mystical significance in every single letter of the Hebrew alphabet.

Joseph Smith’s Egyptian grammar gives us a rational basis for these traditions. We learn that written Egyptian and Hebrew derive from a language that actually encoded these subtle details and relationships. This goes to show that the written language we use today did not evolve from something more primitive. In ages past, it was more complex, but it became corrupted over time. Abraham lived at a time when the traditions of the antediluvian patriarchs had not been completely forgotten. He even possessed their records, which were presumably written in Adamic. Therefore, he understood the common framework underlying subsequent forms of written language. This is why the interpretation of characters in the GAEL is correct, even though the language is not Egyptian.

But the records of the fathers, even the patriarchs, concerning the right of Priesthood, the Lord my God preserved in mine own hands; therefore a knowledge of the beginning of the creation, and also of the planets, and of the stars, as they were made known unto the fathers, have I kept even unto this day, and I shall endeavor to write some of these things upon this record, for the benefit of my posterity that shall come after me. (Abraham 1:31)

In my article on the Adamic language (which I strongly recommend reading), I explained that the purpose of language, as understood by the ancients, was to define relationships between seemingly different ideas. In Chinese compound ideographs, it is often hard to say why particular words were put together. But at one time, these relationships were understood. That much is easy to see, but the part that is more difficult for the modern mind to comprehend is that encoded relationships were considered to be preexisting and predetermined. That means that pure language is prophetic. It is a story that transcends time.

Joseph Smith is the Inspector Clouseau of Egyptology. He was clumsy and did everything wrong, but somehow he still managed to solve the case. His attempt at translation shouldn’t have worked, but it did. I’m not suggesting that some Egyptian scribe secretly encoded a story about Abraham, which happens to be historically accurate, in an ordinary funeral text. No mortal could have done that. But with God, nothing is impossible. The text on that papyrus was prepared from the beginning for a single purpose. I know now that the word Sensen carries deep spiritual meaning. There is a lot more to it than breathing. It teaches us that no matter what culture we come from, we are all part of the same family.

Some people may feel uncomfortable talking about language in this way. I think the problem is that we, as a society, have not learned how to synthesize reason and intuition, study and faith. Even BYU scholars cannot cite revelation in their list of sources. Doing so feels like being high in the clouds without any firm footing or connection to reality. But as we shall see, Abraham’s system of language was anything but nebulous.

Connecting Capacity

The grammar of the language we have been exploring focuses on connection. Connections establish relationships. Relationships can be preserved through oral tradition, but memory is easily corrupted. As I explained in my post about Enos, written language helps preserve knowledge across generations. Compound ideographs are like word constellations. The relationships are visualized. A simple example is the word iota-toues-zipzi (“Egypt”).

This character shows similarity to a genuine Egyptian hieroglyph. It resembles the hoe, which represents the sound mr, a root that means “collection of water.”

The hoe is a component in ta-merau, which makes reference to the watery land of Egypt. (The same mr root occurs in Cumorah, the land of many waters, and Meru, Sumer, etc.) Obviously the oral tradition or accompanying explanation is still important, because without the knowledge that Egypt was discovered by a woman during flood season, it’s hard to explain why these words would go together.

In the GAEL, we learn that when a word serves as a radical (i.e. component part) within a compound, the pronunciation of that word changes. For example, beth becomes hi, iota becomes ki, and part of zubzooloan becomes ash. This helps explain how beth, iota, and zubzooloan come together to form the word zakionhiash or kalzidonhiash.

We find a similar pattern in Chinese characters. Phono-semantic compounds eliminate ambiguity, because the phonetic portion indicates how the word is to be pronounced. But the semantic portion by itself will often have a different pronunciation. This portion may serve as a component in other words.

The GAEL gives us a detailed description of how words connect.

And it should be known…in order to vary the verbs, prepositions participles conjunctions, and adverbs: All names of rivers, seas, of lands of hills, and of mountains should be preserved in their order according to their degrees, from the first. For instance, the first connection should be called Jugos, which signifies verb or action: and the second connection should be called Ka-Jugos, which is a variation, according to the signification of the second degree: Kah Jugos should [be] preserved in the second degree. It signifies an action passed: The third connection is called Kah pr-ga-os, which signifies an action to be received or come to pass. The fourth connection is called Ka-os-Ju which signifies connection and the fifth is called Ka-os-Juga-os and is used to qualify according to the signification of the fifth degree. whether for prepositions, verbs, adverbs &c.

This is perhaps the most puzzling part of the GAEL. I believe it is referring to a concept called valency, which was described by the French linguist Lucien Tesnière in his book Elements of Structural Syntax (published posthumously in 1959). The term valency is borrowed from chemistry.

Like Nephi, I delight in making complex ideas plain, so let me try to make this as plain as possible. Valency can be understood to mean connecting capacity. In chemistry, valence is the number of atoms that can be joined to a given element. This is determined by the number of spaces available in the outermost electron shell. For example, carbon has four open slots, so four hydrogen atoms can attach to it, resulting in a methane molecule.

The same principle can be applied to words in a sentence. In school, most of us were taught that a sentence is composed of a subject and a predicate. But valency is actually a more accurate way of thinking about syntax. Tesnière observed that the verb is typically the most important or influential word in a sentence. The verb determines what other words get attached to it. Different verb types require different connections.

The GAEL describes five types of connection which can be understood in terms of valency:

Jugos. Verb. Ka-jugos. Subject (that which brings to pass the action). Ka-pr-ga-os. Direct object (the recipient of action). Ka-os-ju. Oblique, indirect object, or other modifier. Ka-os-juga-os. Determinative or classifier.

Discussions about valency in a modern context deal with the structure of sentences. But in the language of the GAEL, we are dealing not only with sentences, but also individual words. Remember that this is a fractal language in which the parts have the same properties as the whole. With compound ideographs, valency is not theoretical; connections can actually be visualized in the characters themselves.

So if words and sentences are practically the same (which means that many expressions would have more than one meaning), how can we distinguish them? One tool is the use of determinatives. These are special words that help disambiguate, identify a semantic category, and/or specify what the surrounding components deal with. I think of the determinative as sort of a wrapping that packages all the pieces together into a single unit. Modern English does not really use determinatives very much, but in ancient Egyptian they were very common and occurred at the end of the word. Classifiers are also used in Asian languages such as Chinese.

In the GAEL language, we cannot say that a single word is always a verb or a noun. It all depends on its position relative to other words. A word that is unattached to anything is said to be in the first degree. But when it serves as a radical that is attached to another word, then it is in the second degree.

This character, that is the character of the second degree, is [distinguished] from characters of the first degree by the manner of its being inserted in the compound: as follows: when it is connected it has the signification of the second degree; and when disconnected from the names of other places, it stands for the original sound…

Radicals that attach to open slot number three are said to be in the third degree, and those in the fourth position are in the fourth degree. A single word will often vary in meaning and/or function based on its relative position within the cluster. This is why the same words in the GAEL are listed out five times. We are informed that when pronouncing compound words or expressions, the proper order of degrees should be observed to avoid confusion.

A word composed of five parts is complete. All the slots in its outermost electron shell have been filled and it is a self-contained unit. Like helium, neon, and argon, it is not easily combined with other elements, and therefore it is “independent and arbitrary.” But if we wanted to, we could consider each one of the five components as being the compound of five additional subcomponents. That means that instead of five distinct attributes, the word would have twenty-five. If we go one layer deeper, then there are 125 connecting parts of speech, and in the layer below that, there are 625. In this way, subtleties are encoded and words become multifaceted.

It was difficult at first for me to understand what was different about words in one degree versus those of another. Remember that we are dealing components of words, not sentences. So we don’t really see words taking on a different part of speech, at least not in the way we are used to. Things started to make more sense when I looked at one word in particular: Jah-oh-eh.

1st degree: The earth including its affinity with the other planets, with their governing powers: which are fifteen; 2nd degree: The earth under the government of another, which is one of the fixed stars; which is called Oliblish. 3rd degree: The earth under the government of another of the fixed stars, which is called Enish-go-an-dosh or in other words the power of attraction it has with the earth. 4th degree: The earth and power of attraction it has with the third fixed star, which is called Kai-e van-rash. 5th degree: The earth under the governing powers of Oliblish, Enish-go-on-dosh, and Kae-e-van-rash, which are the grand governing key or in other words, the governing power, which governs the fifteen fixed stars of this system.

I already knew the meaning of Jah-oh-eh from my previous study. It is an esoteric idea that is a bit difficult to explain. I would refer you again to my post “The Hand of God” if you really want to understand. Jah-oh-eh does not refer to the earth per se, but rather to the principle of immanence, or the subtle way in which divinity connects to the material world. It corresponds to the concept known in Lurianic Kabbalah as the Kav, which is the measuring line connecting heaven to earth. The Egyptians personified this idea in the lunar god Yah or Iah, equivalent to Thoth (the god of measurement and writing), who corresponds to the Israelite Yahweh or Jehovah.

The various definitions of Jah-oh-eh in the GAEL are similar to each other, but different degrees focus on different stars or governing powers. I plan to devote an entire post to these astronomical terms, but for now it suffices to say that Oliblish (Amun-Ra) is masculine, Enish-go-on-Dosh (the goddess Hathor) is feminine, and Kae-e-van-rash (the opening of the mouth) is the Egyptian equivalent of receiving the Holy Ghost. So the three constitute a kind of holy trinity or dialectical triad.

I see a connection between these three governing stars and the syntactical structure that I outlined above. If we think of the various subcomponents as concepts (having a semantic function) rather than parts of speech (having a syntactical function), we can revise of the list of degrees as follows:

Jugos. Base form. Ka-jugos. Active, masculine, or spiritual aspect. Ka-pr-ga-os. Receptive, feminine, or temporal aspect. Ka-os-ju. Connecting or extending aspect. Ka-os-juga-os. Signifies completion, or all parts taken together.

The difference between degrees can be compared to different hues of the same color. The change is subtle, but measurable. Higher degrees tend to be broader and more abstract, because they literally have more semantic components attached, whereas the lower degrees tend to be more specific and narrower in meaning.

Kiahbroam = Zubzooloan

A wide range of topics are covered in the GAEL, but the first few characters copied from the Sensen papyrus are given the most detailed treatment. This is where Joseph focused his attention when he wanted to understand the language.

The first three hieratic segments are interrelated. Ahbroam is a component in kiahbroam. As I mentioned before, this seems to match up with the way the rope coil appears first by itself and then part of a larger set of characters. Kiahbroam, we are told, is equivalent to zubzooloan. And zubzooloan is a component in zakionhiash, the reed leaf.

I wanted to better understand how kiahbroam corresponds to zubzooloan. I figured that one of these was a standard phonetic or compound pronunciation, while the other emphasized the semantic aspect of each of the subcomponents. But I didn’t know how the individual morphemes line up. Zubzooloan, having three syllables, looks like it has three components, but kiahbroam has four syllables. Plus the spelling is inconsistent throughout the GAEL, so I wasn’t sure what Joseph had in mind.

Despite my uncertainty, it seemed clear that the first syllables line up: ki=zub. The definitions of zub in the GAEL have to do with ascending: going up, being caught up, climbing, ascending toward the sun. In the first and second degrees, the definitions have to do with beginning: the first principle or first institution.

As I pondered these definitions, I thought to myself, “I wonder if there is a Chinese word that means the same thing.” One of the first words that came to mind was Kia, as in Kia Motors. It turns out that the first character in this word, 起 (ki or qi), is an almost perfect match. This word means “to rise” or “stand up.” It can also mean “to begin” or “initiate.” Plus, the semantic portion by itself is pronounced zou or tseu, which is not far off from zub.

We could chalk up these similarities to coincidence, but there is a direct parallel between the Chinese character and the Egyptian hieroglyphs. The semantic part of ki (走) is a depiction of a man and a foot, and related to it is the very common “walking” radical 辶. This glyph looks like a man with two legs, so it’s not surprising that it means “to walk.” Zou 走 can also mean “to leave” or “depart.” Going back to the papyrus, it’s remarkable that the section that Joseph Smith transliterated as kiahbroam includes the walking legs hieroglyph, which can mean “to leave” or “to return,” depending on which way the feet are facing.

Another word in the GAEL related to zub is zub-eh. This is defined as being “in” or “within,” also “to be with.” We know from the separate counting document that eh means the number one. So if we combine zou 走 or the walking radical 辶 with the character that means “one” (一), this should mean something, right? It certainly does. In Chinese, the foot combined with “one” results in zhi 之, which indicates possession (“of”). Zhi is a component in words meaning “within” (之中) and “among” (之間). A similar word utilizing “one” and the walking radical is the Japanese sube 辷 (“to glide”). Though semantically unrelated, sube is a match in terms of pronunciation.

The next part of zubzooloan is zool. Definitions of zool in the GAEL have to do with lineage, descent, chronology, birthright, and the rights of the priesthood. For example:

5th degree: From any or some fixed period of time back to the beginning of creation showing the chronology of the patriarchs; the right of the priesthood, and the lineage through whom it shall be continued by promise… 2nd degree: From Abraham back to his father and from Abraham’s father back to his father and so on back through the line of progenitors…

These descriptions sound like the principle of patriarchal lineage which is found in certain branches of Buddhism. It is the idea that teachings can be traced through a genealogy back to the Buddha himself. Lineage, in this case, does not really refer to physical bloodline. It is more akin to priesthood line of authority. The early teachers and transmitters of spiritual knowledge are called patriarchs. The Chinese word for “patriarch,” which literally means “ancestor” or “founder,” is zu 祖. Zu is obviously not far off from zool.

If zool means “patriarch” or “father,” that means that the corresponding part of kiahbroam must, therefore, be ab, the Semitic word for “father.” It’s starting to make sense—kiahbroam is the same word as zubzooloan, just adapted to the local dialect. Knowing the broader meaning of the word “father,” we can better understand what Abraham meant when he said that he “sought for the blessings of the fathers” (Abraham 1:2). He wasn’t talking about his earthly lineage. He wanted a teacher who had real authority.

Let’s go back to ki 起 for a moment. An additional meaning of this word is “come out” or “extract” (Kia literally means “coming out of Asia”). The expression zubzool, therefore, must mean “coming out from the fathers.” This is consistent with one of the definitions that we find in the GAEL.

Zubzool: …referring to any particular subject or thing as having came out from my fathers house…

Now that we know that zub=ki and zool=ab, we can therefore conclude that oan must correspond to roam. Unfortunately though, the GAEL does not give us a detailed description of what oan means. One section says oan is “the earth.” We are also told that oan is an abbreviation of the compound zubzooloan, which can mean “the first of anything,” or “before some other time.”

There are indications that oan was used as a determinative or classifier. One definition in the GAEL describes it as “pointing to some particular subject.” An apparently synonymous term with the same symbol gives more information:

To point out subject— that is, it signifies a combination of the subject: also to designate [distinguish] one sentence from another, according to the different marks of punctuation; signifying the whole of anything or the whole earth.

As I mentioned before, determinatives help group things together into a single unit or collective. Another possible determinative in the GAEL is zi, as in zipzi. This word, which is defined as virtue or modesty, may be equivalent to the Chinese word zi 子, which means “offspring.” Zi 子 is a component in many everyday words such as zhuozi 桌子 (“table”) and shuazi 刷子 (“brush”). It seems to be a kind of diminutive (bringing to mind the virgin motif) that classifies things as being common or familiar, not unlike the German suffixes –lein and –chen.

Although oan is not well-defined, we can draw some conclusions based on what we know about Ahbroam. The name Abraham is said to mean “father of many.” This etymology doesn’t really work in Hebrew, but it does if we take into account the Arabic word ruham, which means “numerous” or “multitude.” Ruham must be the Semitic equivalent of oan. This makes sense, because oan, as a determinative, defines a collective.

Is there a Chinese word meaning “multitude” that sounds like oan? Of course there is. The word wan 万 means “myriad” or “a large number.” In some dialects, it is pronounced uang or uaing. As a kanji in Japanese, this character can also mean “all” or “everything,” which closely matches the GAEL definition saying that it “signifies the whole of anything or the whole earth.”

Descendants of this word are found in many languages, including those in the Altaic and Indo-European language families. From Middle Chinese muan, it appeared in Tocharian as tumane and Persian as tuman. In Japanese and Korean, it is man. It wouldn’t surprise me if it is related to the proto-Indo-European root menegh, which is the basis of the English word many.

So now almost all the words and characters are accounted for. We know that ki and zub are connected to the walking legs hieroglyph. Ab and zool seem to correspond to the rope coil. After making all these connections, there was one Egyptian character that still seemed mysterious.

I couldn’t figure out what the “three strokes” character was doing here until I realized that it corresponds to oan and ruham. The meaning is perfectly consistent; it is a determinative indicating plurality. As a non-Egyptologist, I can’t say what grammatical or semantic function it plays in the Sensen text. From my perspective, it looks out of place. But in the context of Joseph Smith’s Egyptian grammar, everything fits. Abraham really is the father of many.

Other Egyptian characters that indicate plurality include the rope coil and the quail chick. So it’s very fitting that Ab-ruham, the father of many nations, is represented by a symbol that serves as a plural marker.

Moral of the Story: When Something Seems Weird, Look Closer

Analyzing the GAEL is an overwhelming task. My goal here has not been to cover the topic comprehensively. But I hope I have made my case and opened up new avenues for research. Joseph Smith’s Egyptian studies must be taken seriously. Instead of assuming that he was confused or that someone else must have been responsible, we should believe that Joseph was receiving revelation. He was learning things that were far beyond his ability to convey. Support for the GAEL comes not from a few tenuous parallels, but a strong web of interlocking confirmations. But to really understand spiritual things, we must be willing to go beyond the bounds of what seems reasonable. As we learn more, we will find that things we previously considered strange or esoteric are actually perfectly logical.

