A Look Back Into History

the author was born 1805 in Sharon, Vermont

Sometime in 1820, his life changed; it was that year that he experienced the First Vision:

16th year of my age a pillar of light above the brightness of the sun at noon day come down from above and rested upon me. I was filled with the spirit of God and the Lord opened the heavens upon me and I saw the Lord.

16th year of my age a pillar of light above the brightness of the sun at noon day come down from above and rested upon me. I was filled with the spirit of God and the Lord opened the heavens upon me and I saw the Lord.

There is no evidence that he used a copy of the Bible to assist in preparing the Book , The Book  was not written by him. It was written by ancient prophets of God, and he only served to translate the text and bring it into publication

Reformed Egyptian

What is "reformed Egyptian?"

Critics who raise the objection seem to be operating under the false impression that reformed Egyptian is used in the Book as a proper name. In fact, the word reformed is used in the Book  in this context as an adjective, meaning "altered, modified, or changed." This is made clear by him, who tells us that "the characters which are called among us the reformed Egyptian, [were] handed down and altered by us" and that "none other people knoweth our language" ( 9:32, 34). First we should emphasize that Mormon is describing Egyptian characters, or what we today would call a script or writing system. It is the form or shape of the characters or symbols that was altered by the Nephites. Nephite reformed Egyptian is thus a unique script. It derived from the Egyptian writing systems but then was modified and adapted to suit Nephite language and writing materials.

Egyptian hieratic and demotic. The Egyptian language was written in three related but distinct scripts. The oldest is hieroglyphic script, dating to around 3000 B.C.; it was essentially a monumental script for stone inscriptions. Hieratic, a second script, is a modified form of Egyptian hieroglyphics used to write formal documents on papyrus with brush and ink, and demotic is a cursive script. Thus, both the hieratic and demotic scripts could be considered "reformed" or modified versions of the original hieroglyphic script. These are both examples of writing the Egyptian language in reformed versions of the Egyptian hieroglyphic script; there are also several examples of the use of reformed or modified Egyptian characters to write non-Egyptian languages.

Byblos Syllabic texts. The earliest known example of mixing a Semitic Ianguage with modified Egyptian hieroglyphic characters is the Byblos Syllabic inscriptions (eighteenth century B.C.), from the city of Byblos on the Phoenician coast. This script is described as a "syllabary [that] is clearly inspired by the Egyptian hieroglyphic system, and in fact is the most important link known between the hieroglyphs and the Canaanite alphabet." Interestingly enough, most Byblos Syllabic texts were written on copper plates. Thus, it would not be unreasonable to describe the Byblos Syllabic texts as a Semitic language written on metal plates in "reformed Egyptian characters," which is precisely what the Book describes.

Cretan hieroglyphics. Early forms of writing in Crete apparently developed from a combination of "Egyptian hieroglyphic, Mesopotamian cuneiform and Phoenician native signs into one single, new pictographic script." Note again that there is a mixture of Semitic (Mesopotamian and Phoenician) and Egyptian writing systems, precisely as described in the Book .

Meroitic. Meroitic, the script of ancient Nubia (modern Sudan), "was first recorded in writing in the second century B.C. in an 'alphabetic' script consisting of twenty-three symbols, most of which were borrowed or at least derived from Egyptian writing....The script has two forms, hieroglyphic and cursive." Meroitic hieroglyphic signs were "borrowed from the Egyptian...[and] the cursive script derived mainly from the Egyptian demotic script."

Psalm 20 in demotic Egyptian. Scholars have also recently deciphered an Aramaic version of Psalm 20:2-6 that was written in demotic Egyptian characters. This is precisely what the Book of Mormon claims existed: a version of the Hebrew scriptures in the Hebrew language, but written using Egyptian characters.

Proto-Sinaitic and the alphabet. Semitic speakers of early second millennium B.C. Syria and Palestine seem to have adopted reformed or modified versions of both Egyptian hieroglyphs and Mesopotamian cuneiform into syllabic and alphabetic systems of writing. Ultimately, this reformed Egyptian script became the basis for the Phoenician alphabet, from which nearly all subsequent alphabets derive. "The Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions were written in a Semitic language, and...their letters were the prototypes for the Phoenician alphabet. The letters are alphabetic, acrophonic in origin, and consonantal, and their forms are derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs." "Since the Canaanite/Phoenician syllabary formed the basis of the Greek alphabet, and the Greek in turn of the Latin, it means, in the words of Gardiner, that 'the hieroglyphs live on, though in transmuted [or could we not say reformed?] form, within our own alphabet.'"In a very real sense, our own Latin alphabet is itself a type of reformed Egyptian, since the ultimate source of our characters is Egyptian hieroglyphics

 The term cuneiform was first used in the nineteenth century, while hieroglyphics was the Greek term for the Egyptian writing system.

Gold Plates did they weigh 230 LBS