“Yea, I make a record in the language of my father, which consists of
the learning of the Jews and the language of the Egyptians” (1 Nephi 1:2).
Somewhere around the time of
Jeremiah, who was born between 650 and 645 B.C., based on a series of events
that occurred about four centuries later, namely the letter of Aristeas written
to his brother Philocrates, as brought into the library in the time of Ptolemy
Philadelphus. Whether the letter and its history is accurate (there are always
questions about ancient Egyptian history), it speaks of an event that is found
elsewhere in history, namely, the movement of numerous Jewish priests from
Jerusalem to Thebes along the upper Nile in Egypt,
carrying Egyptian records with them.
The script, called Meroïtic, was the written
phonetic script of Northern Sudan in the ancient civilization of Kush, located
west of the Red Sea near the city of Meroë, which was located on the east bank
of the Nile in the area known as Török. These Jews later occupied an area
in ancient Kush, near Meroë, south of where the
Atbara River flows off to the east.
Interested in
promoting Judaism, and not wanting anything to do with Alexandrian society,
they devised a plan to communicate through this Meroïtic language, which was basically a series
of Egyptian characters .
Today, it is seen as the
oldest written script in Africa other than Egyptian hieroglyphs and the related
hieratic and demotic scripts. It has a hieroglyphic form using some adopted
Egyptian signs and a cursive form similar to demotic. The script had one
innovation uncommon in ancient written scripts, such as Egyptian hieroglyphics
or Greek, in that there was a word separator, similar in function to spaces in
modern scripts, that looks similar to a colon. Meroïtic is first attested in the 2nd century BC
and was continuously used until the fall of Meroë in the mid-4th century AD.
The script was
rediscovered in the 19th and 20th centuries as Western
archaeologists began investigating the ancient ruins of Török northern Sudan
(the ancient Kingdom of Kush). The first substantial progress in deciphering Meroïtic came around 1909 when
British archaeologist Francis Llewellyn Griffith was able to use a barque stand
bearing the names of Meroïtic rulers
in both Meroïtic and
Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Meroïtic
hieroglyphs were then corresponded to the Meroïtic cursive script,
allowing the transliteration of Meroïtic.
Some vocabulary was
later deciphered by scholars including loan words from Egyptian, gods, names,
honorific phrases, and other common words. However, the script remains largely
undeciphered. The greatest hope for decipherment, an inscription similar to the
Rosetta Stone, containing writing in Meroïtic
and a known language such as Egyptian, Greek, Latin, or
Axumite, has yet to be found.
Further confounding
research is the debate regarding which language family Meroïtic belongs to. Cognate (related)
analysis has proceeded extremely slowly due to the dispute as to which language
family Meroïtic properly
belongs.
It is evident that no
language has ever been fully deciphered using purely statistical or
mathematical techniques, and Meroïtic
will of course never be completely understood using these
tools alone—what will be needed, is something like the Rosetta Stone, or the
Urim and Thummim.
In particular, many
of the subtleties of human semantics and syntax are irregular or do not follow
consistent patterns, which statistics would be excellent at analyzing. Thus, we
have a language, Meroïtic,
that is simply not going to be deciphered until the time of the Lord.
Does this sound
familiar?
Nephi and Moroni’s
“Reformed Egyptian was in that category. It simply could not be translated
until the Lord was ready to have it done. Even today, 186 years after Joseph
Smith translated the Reformed Egyptian from the plates, no other Egyptologist
has shown his ability to do so, even from the scrap of glyphs shown below.
It is not that Meroïtic (2nd image above) or Reformed Egyptian (above)
are the same language, or even similar. It is important to note that they both
evidently came about from the same source—some type of reformed or altered
Egyptian language
It should be noted that this
reformed or altered Meroïtic script
is not a fluke somewhere, or a language meant to be hidden from the people like Nephi’s
Reformed Egyptian, since it was used in the Kingdom of Kush, from the 2nd
century B.C. onwards until the 5th century A.D., about a 700 year period, in an
area of the Nile Valley stretching from Philae in Nubia to near Khartoum in
Sudan. The form of this script was borrowed from Egyptian, but the way the
system worked was quite different.
Whether or not this Meroïtic had the same type of beginning
as did Lehi’s Reformed Egyptian is
not known, and may never be determined until the Lord reveals more of his
secrets.
Eastern Sudanic (Northern) language family with Meroïtic inserted according
to the research of Rilly, who considered it a possible vestigial language of
Lower Nubia
The important part is that there
is a pattern that is not connected to the Book of Mormon or the scriptural
record, but to history itself. One can only wonder where we might be in better
understanding Lehi’s Reformed Egyptian if knowledgeable scholars spent less
time trying to convince us it did not exist and more time in trying to find a
way it might fit into the Egyptian world as Rilley did with Meroïtic.
Once again, the point is there
is a type—a pattern shown in the Meroïtic
script that should open the door in Academia to where a similar language,
such as Lehi’s Reformed Egyptian might
also fit. After all, if there is one type of altered Egyptian that can be
traced back to the Egyptian language, and there are as many Eastern Sudanic
languages in that family as Rilley has shown and orthodox Egyptologists accept,
there is certainly a reason to see if Lehi’s Reformed Egyptian is another such
language and see where it might fit. If this idea was connected to anything
other than the Book of Mormon scriptural record, it would have sufficient merit
to warrant such an effort. It might also, along this same line, be suggested
that if this idea was not connected with a different approach than the one
found at BYU over the past hundred years, namely, Mesoamerica, it might even
find some interest there where a greater reason to look into it could be found
than regular Acdemia.
The complete Meroïtic text or
glyphs. The main impetus behind deciphering Meroïtic was done by the English
scholar Francis Llewellyn Griffith (1862-1934), who worked out the phonetic
value of the signs by comparing proper names on texts in Meroïtic and Egyptian
It should also be noted that
while scholars can read the glyphs, they cannot understand what the
texts mean, because the problem is that the Meroïtic language is an isolate as
far as linguists know. It has no known relatives, and the meaning of its words
and its grammatical structure remain relatively obscure, therefore so impeding
attempts at reading of the texts.
As Moroni closed out his
father’s record, saying: “But
the Lord knoweth the things which we have written, and also that none other
people knoweth our language; and because that none other people knoweth our
language, therefore he hath prepared means for the interpretation thereof”
(Mormon 9:34). Again, this is not to say that Meroïtic is Moroni’s language, or has anything
to do with the Book of Mormon scriptural record—but it is a type. Consequently,
we now have proof of such a thing as Reformed Egyptian that Egyptologists
accept as real and existing, but cannot read and do not understand.
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