Joseph Smith Papyri
The Joseph Smith Papyri are Egyptian funerary papyrus fragments from ancient Thebes dated between 300 and 100 BC which, along with four mummies, were once owned by Joseph Smith, the founder of the Latter Day Saint movement. Smith purchased the mummies and papyrus documents from a traveling exhibitor in Kirtland, Ohio, in 1835. Smith said that the papyrus contained the records of the ancient patriarchs Abraham and Joseph.
In 1842, Smith published the first part of the Book of Abraham, which he said was an inspired translation from the papyri. The consensus among both Mormon and non-Mormon scholars is that the characters on the surviving papyrus fragments do not match Smith's translation. A translation of the Book of Joseph was never published by Smith, but the scroll purported to be the untranslated Book of Joseph has been found to be a copy of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, a common funerary document, which contains no references to the biblical patriarch Joseph.
After Smith's death, the papyri passed through several hands; they were presumed to have reached a museum in Chicago and subsequently destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire. Not all of the fragments were burned, however, and some were eventually acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1947. The museum knew the importance of the papyri to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and, in 1966, reached out to church leaders to notify them of their collection. The LDS Church acquired the fragments in 1967. The rediscovery of the papyri sparked renewed interest and scholarship. Due to the importance of the papyri to the Latter Day Saint movement, they have been heavily studied and debated.
Contents
There were four mummies, two rolls, and various other fragments of papyri purchased by Joseph Smith and his associates. Eyewitness accounts conflict on the gender of the mummies, indicating it was difficult to tell. Oliver Cowdery wrote:According to Cowdery, these two scrolls contained "the writings of Abraham and Joseph."
W. W. Phelps, Joseph Smith's scribe in 1835, wrote in a letter to his wife:
Because the collection was later sold and divided and parts of it were lost in the Great Chicago Fire, its exact contents are unknown. However, based on what is still in existence, it can be concluded that there were at least 5 separate funerary documents as shown in the following table:
| Egyptian document | Text description | Joseph Smith description | Joseph Smith Papyri Number | Date created |
| "Hor Book of Breathing" | Funerary scroll made for a Theban Priest name Horus. It is among the earliest known copies of the Book of Breathing. Sometimes referred to as a Breathing Permit or Sensen Text | "Book of Abraham" | I, torn fragments pasted into IV, X, XI and Facsimile #3 | between 238–153 BC |
| "Ta-sherit-Min Book of the Dead" | Funerary scroll made for Ta-sherit-Min | "Book of Joseph" | II, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII | circa 300–100 BC |
| "Nefer-ir-nebu Book of the Dead" Judgement Scene | Funerary papyrus scroll fragment made for Nefer-ir-nebu showing a vignette with the deceased standing before Osiris, waiting to have her heart weighed on a balance against a feather to determine if she is worthy of further existence or having her soul devoured by Ammit | No known description given by Joseph Smith. | III a,b | circa 300–100 BC |
| "Amenhotep Book of the Dead" | Fragment from a funerary scroll made for Amenhotep | Parts were translated as a short history of a Princess Katumin, daughter of Pharoah Onitas | The papyrus is no longer extant. Characters were copied into a notebook. | Unknown |
| Sheshonq Hypocephalus | A funerary text placed under the head of the deceased named Sheshonq | Facsimile #2 from the "Book of Abraham" | The papyrus is no longer extant. | Unknown |
History
Ancient origins
All of the mummies and papyri date to the Ptolemaic Egypt period, from sometime between 300 and 100 BC in the ancient Egyptian city of Thebes, near modern-day Luxor.The bodies and papyri were interred west of ancient Thebes in the Theban Necropolis, probably in the valley of the nobles.
A scroll from one of the mummies has been identified as belonging to an Egyptian priest named Horos, who came from an important family of Theban Priests of Amon-Re in the cult of "Min who massacres his enemies". His family tree can be reliably reconstructed from independent sources to eight generations.
Discovery by Antonio Lebolo
, from the Piedmont region of modern Italy, had been a loyal follower of Napoleon, serving in his military and law enforcement. In the years following Napoleon's fall from power in 1815, Lebolo left his family and went to Egypt in order to escape the problems of Europe. He had a prominent friend, Bernardino Drovetti, who was also in Egypt for the same reason that gave him a job as his agent in Thebes. Lebolo stayed in Egypt from 1817–1822. Part of Lebolo's employment responsibilities were to undertake excavations of Egyptian antiquities to later sell. He led teams of sometimes hundreds of locals, digging throughout the Theban Necropolis, in the valley of the Kings, Queens and Nobles. Items that he excavated found their way into many modern collections, including major contributions to the Turin Museum and the Louvre.Sometime while he was there he excavated 11 mummies and accompanying papyri, from which came the Joseph Smith Papyri collection. It appears that Drovetti allowed Lebolo to personally excavate in the Valley of the Nobles, as this collection was personally maintained by Lebolo and not passed on to Drovetti. It is not known exactly which tomb they came from, however Theban tombs 32, 33, and 157 have been named as possible candidates. Theban tomb 33 is frequently visited by LDS tour groups, and often given as the place where they were excavated based on a description by Oliver Cowdery. However, this connection is highly speculative and disputed.
Theban Tomb 32 is presented as a possibility based on Lebolo actually carving his name in the tunnel-passage, and the existence of other finds of his that probably came from this tomb.
Before his death on the night of February 18–19, 1830, Lebolo sent the 11 mummies and papyri to Albano Oblasser of Trieste to sell them. The mummies were shipped to New York sometime between 1830 and 1833, where they ended up in the hands of Michael Chandler no later than March 1833. Chandler claimed multiple times to be the nephew of Lebolo; however, this is almost certainly untrue. All evidence suggests that Chandler was acting as an agent for an investment group in Philadelphia that had purchased the mummies.
On tour in the North Eastern States
Between April 1833 and June 1835, Michael Chandler toured the eastern United States, displaying and selling seven of the mummies as he went along. In April 1833, he displayed them first at the masonic hall and then the arcade in Philadelphia. His display attracted large crowds wherever he went. The first complete mummy ever displayed to the public in the United States arrived just ten years earlier in 1823, and had set off a mania in the United States for mummies and Egypt. Chandler's exhibit of eleven mummies was the largest ever up to that point in the United States. While Chandler was in Philadelphia, a doctor named W. E. Horner gathered six other doctors and gave Chandler an unsolicited endorsement of his collection:Chandler had this "Certificate of the Learned" made into a placard that was circulated wherever he went, including two years later when he arrived in Kirtland, Ohio. After Philadelphia, the unsold six mummies along with the papyri moved on to Baltimore during July and August 1833. They stayed at the Baltimore Museum, and proved to be very popular. Chandler expanded his stay there from a planned two weeks to five weeks. The following advertisement appeared in several newspapers, placed by the manager of the museum:
The next documented location of the exhibit was Lancaster, Pennsylvania in late August and then Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in September 1833. They were in Pittsburgh for four weeks during October and November 1833, and at the Western Museum in Cincinnati in December. In January 1834, they stayed in Louisville for a few days. In April and early May, they were shown at the corner of Chartres and St. Louis Streets in New Orleans. From May 1834 until February 1835, there is no known record of their whereabouts. In February 1835, Chandler displayed the mummies in Hudson, Ohio, just 30 miles south of Kirtland, Ohio, and the next month they were displayed in Cleveland.
While in Cleveland, a reporter from the Cleveland Whig published in March 1835 a description of the collection:
A letter to the editor of the Painesville Telegraph for 27 March 1835 described the collection in depth:
The seven mummies not sold to Joseph Smith
Only four of the seven mummies Chandler sold before he met Joseph Smith have a current known location. Two mummies were sold by Chandler in Philadelphia to Dr. Samuel George Morton, who bought them for Philadelphia's Academy of Natural Sciences. These were dissected by Dr. Morton in front of other Academy members. Dr. Morton was interested in phrenology, a pseudoscience popular at the time that sought to predict mental traits from the physical features of the cranium. He would remove the skulls from the body, fill each skull with buckshot, and then weigh the skull to determine the cavity size. Today, these two skulls reside in the University of Pennsylvania cranial collection.In January 1834, while the mummies were in Louisville, Junius Brutus Booth, famous actor and father of John Wilkes Booth, purchased two of the mummies, one of which Booth said had two rows of teeth. Booth had intended to send them to President Andrew Jackson's Tennessee home, but after being told how rare the items were, gave them to John Varden, owner of the Washington Museum of Curiosities. Varden sold his collection to the National Museum of Natural History in 1841, where the mummies are most likely located.
Somewhere in Chandler's travels between his exhibitions in Philadelphia and Baltimore, his collection was reduced by three mummies. Coincidentally, in the spring of 1834, a museum opened in Detroit with three mummies, but was destroyed by fire in 1842. Though not conclusive, this is strong circumstantial evidence that they could be the same mummies from Chandler's collection.