(Taken from "Hieroglyphs, Golden Plates and Typos" by Bill Wylson.)
Considering the difficulty in making metal plates, it was critical to conserve space on the Nephite records. Writing in Egyptian hieroglyphs rather than in their native Hebrew allowed the writers to occupy less space. Moroni wrote;
"We have written this record according to our knowledge, in the characters which are called among us the reformed Egyptian, being handed down and altered by us, according to our manner of speech. And if our plates had been sufficiently large we should have written in Hebrew."
Demotic Egyptian was phonetic, each character representing a unit of speech, therefore, there would have been no substantial space saving over writing in Hebrew. The Nephite prophets would have taken up more space on the plates writing in demotic characters than writing in their native Hebrew. This can easily be illustrated with the Rosetta Stone.
The Rosetta stone, inscribed in 196 B.C., contains an engraving written in two idioms, Egyptian and Greek. The Egyptian inscription is written in hieroglyphics, then repeated in demotic characters. Translators believe that the text was first written in demotic, then re-written in hieroglyphics and translated into Greek before being transcribed onto the stone.
A rough idea of the possible amount of space saved from Greek to demotic and from demotic to hieroglyphics can be determined by studying the number of characters and the amount of space used for each of these three scripts.
The demotic inscription comprises 23% less space than the Greek inscription. The text contains 54 lines of Greek writing and only 32 lines of demotic. The demotic text contains approximately 3360 characters. The Greek text contains about 6700 characters. The compression of demotic over Greek is about two to one.
Part of the hieroglyphic inscription on the Rosetta stone has been broken off, leaving only 14 lines of hieroglyphs intact. These 14 lines match the last 18 lines of the demotic writing and the last 28 lines of the Greek. The height of the hieroglyphs is about twice that of the demotic and three times that of the Greek characters.
If the hieroglyphs on the Rosetta were equal in size to the demotic, the text would have been half the size that it was. Then only seven lines of hieroglyphs would have corresponded to 18 lines of demotic. Consequently, in order to conserve the necessary space, the Book of Mormon authors must have used a highly pictographic, rather than phonetic, Egyptian writing.
Learn more about the coming forth of the Book Of Mormon in Bill Wylson's new book, Hieroglyphs, Golden Plates and Typos.
Considering the difficulty in making metal plates, it was critical to conserve space on the Nephite records. Writing in Egyptian hieroglyphs rather than in their native Hebrew allowed the writers to occupy less space. Moroni wrote;
"We have written this record according to our knowledge, in the characters which are called among us the reformed Egyptian, being handed down and altered by us, according to our manner of speech. And if our plates had been sufficiently large we should have written in Hebrew."
Demotic Egyptian was phonetic, each character representing a unit of speech, therefore, there would have been no substantial space saving over writing in Hebrew. The Nephite prophets would have taken up more space on the plates writing in demotic characters than writing in their native Hebrew. This can easily be illustrated with the Rosetta Stone.
The Rosetta stone, inscribed in 196 B.C., contains an engraving written in two idioms, Egyptian and Greek. The Egyptian inscription is written in hieroglyphics, then repeated in demotic characters. Translators believe that the text was first written in demotic, then re-written in hieroglyphics and translated into Greek before being transcribed onto the stone.
A rough idea of the possible amount of space saved from Greek to demotic and from demotic to hieroglyphics can be determined by studying the number of characters and the amount of space used for each of these three scripts.
The demotic inscription comprises 23% less space than the Greek inscription. The text contains 54 lines of Greek writing and only 32 lines of demotic. The demotic text contains approximately 3360 characters. The Greek text contains about 6700 characters. The compression of demotic over Greek is about two to one.
Part of the hieroglyphic inscription on the Rosetta stone has been broken off, leaving only 14 lines of hieroglyphs intact. These 14 lines match the last 18 lines of the demotic writing and the last 28 lines of the Greek. The height of the hieroglyphs is about twice that of the demotic and three times that of the Greek characters.
If the hieroglyphs on the Rosetta were equal in size to the demotic, the text would have been half the size that it was. Then only seven lines of hieroglyphs would have corresponded to 18 lines of demotic. Consequently, in order to conserve the necessary space, the Book of Mormon authors must have used a highly pictographic, rather than phonetic, Egyptian writing.
Learn more about the coming forth of the Book Of Mormon in Bill Wylson's new book, Hieroglyphs, Golden Plates and Typos.
RSS Feed
