This is what has been recovered:
Careful analysis has shown that the picture is the source of Facimile 1 at the start of the Book of Abraham. Characters from the middle column of the papyrus are in Smith's notebook beside his translation of the first part of the Book of Abraham. Note the gaps in the papyrus. It appears that those important gaps were seen by Joseph Smith. The characters with the picture are hieroglyphics; those in the left columns are hieratic.
The next figure shows along the top line the sequence of characters from Joseph
Smith's notebook. Like Hebrew, they read from right to left. The bottom line
shows the characters from the papyrus, second column from the right, top two
lines. Characters in red are those invented by Joseph Smith to fill the gaps.
They do not exist in any language.
The next figure shows by the red box the lines documented in Smith's notebook.
Compare that with the portion of the Book of Abraham with the same documentation.
It seems reasonable that the rest of the papyrus hieratic columns was the
basis for the rest of the Book of Abraham, though there is no notebook evidence
for such an extrapolations.
Back, Next
Intro,
Book of Abraham,
Creation,
Origin,
Papyrus,
Meanings,
Facsimile-1,
Facsimile-2,
Facsimile-3,
other errors,
summary