Hugh Nibley - Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, Vol. 18: An Approach to to the Book of Abraham

2010 The Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies and Hugh Nibley and Associates, LC

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Contents

Illustrations

Lucy Mack Smith portrait with Facsimile 1 in background

JSP I mounted on backing

Detail of Lucy Mack Smith portrait

Facsimile 2, Church Historians copy

Facsimile 2, Hedlock engraving

Meux hypocephalus

Franklin S. Spalding

Facsimile 1, July 1842 Millennial Star

JSP VI, swallow vignette

JSP III, judgment scene

JSP I, 1842 and 1907 versions of Facsimile 1

Myers and Nash hypocephali

Facsimile 2 and Vienna hypocephalus

Double-headed figures

Two birds over a lion couch

JSP I, detail of Abrahams hands

Egyptian canonical drawing of hands and thumbs

Lion-couch scenes at Philae

Close parallel to Facsimile

Egyptian canonical drawing of figure with guidelines

Pharoah on lion couch, shrine of Opet

Chaldean bed on Assyrian bronze amulet

Persian-style lion-paw throne leg and Darius on lion-footed chair

Old Kingdom lion altars and couch

Ivory headrest, lion couches, tomb of Tutankhamun

Bed of Osiris and altars

Archaic funeral rite

Conception, birth, and nursing of Hatshepsut on lion couches

Temple of Opet at Karnak

Flint knives

Mummy of Osiris on back of crocodile, Philae

Ba -bird

Hawk delivers Osiris in lion-couch scenes

Facsimiles 1, 2, 3 in sequence

Temple of Opet, three rooms

Busiris and Heracles

Facsimile 1, Facsimile 2, JSP III, four canopic figures

Four sons of Horus as deities

Four birds to the four corners

Louvre N 3525 hypocephalus, four-headed ram

Four sons of Horus chart

Four nations of man, tomb of Seti I

Northern polar stars (2000 B.C., A.D. 2000)

Gold vessel with four lotuses, tomb of Nebamun

Nefertem lion as guard, Philae

Passport approval by Khnumhotep

Saqqara panels and pillars

Pylons and niches as pillars of heaven

Ramses III on pillars of heaven

Philip Arrhidaeus on pillars of heaven

Crocodile surrounded by zigzags

Zigzag lines as expanse of the heavens

Zigzag lines as water, tomb of Ramses IX

Zigzag lines as firmament and waters of life

Herman Witsiuss Aegyptiaca and William Haless Chronology

Shrine to sun-god of Pharaoh Niuserre

Map of Mesopotamia and Egypt

Metternich Stela

Facsimile 1

Facsimile 3

Kirtland Egyptian Papers

Egyptian Manuscript #1

Egyptian Manuscript #3

Egyptian Manuscript #4

Egyptian Manuscript #6

Egyptian Manuscript #7

Book of Abraham Manuscript #2

Book of Abraham Manuscript #3

Book of Abraham Manuscript #1

Book of Abraham Manuscript #4

Key to Abbreviations

AfO Archiv fr Orientforschung

ASAEAnnales du service des antiquits de lgypte

BDBook of the Dead

BEBibliothque gyptologique

CdE Chronique dgypte

CT Coffin Text, as appearing in Adriaan de Buck, The Egyptian Coffin Texts

CWHN The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley

IE Improvement Era

IFAOInstitut franais darchologie orientale du Caire

JEAJournal of Egyptian Archaeology

JEOLJaarbericht van het Vooraziatisch-Egyptisch Genootschap (Gezelschap): Ex oriente lux

JNESJournal of Near Eastern Studies

JQRJewish Quarterly Review

JSPJoseph Smith Papyrus (Papyri)

MDAIK Mitteilungen des deutschen archologischen InstitutsAbteilung Kairo

MIFAOMmoires publis par les membres de linstitut franais darchologie orientale du Caire

MMAFMmoires publis par les membres de la Mission archologique franaise du Caire

PG J.-P. Migne, ed., Patrologiae Cursus Completus: Series Graeca, 162 vols. (Paris: Garnier, 185786)

PL J.-P. Migne, ed., Patrologiae Cursus Completus: Series Latina , 221 vols. (Paris: Garnier, 184464)

PO Franois Nau and Ren Graffin, eds., Patrologia Orientalis (Paris: Librarie de Paris, Firmin-Didot, 1903 )

PTPyramid Texts

RdERevue dgyptologie

REJRevue des etudes juives

RTRecueil de travaux relatifs la philologie et larchologie gyptiennes et assyriennes

TB Babylonian Talmud

UGAKurt Sethe and Hermann Kees, eds., Untersuchungen zur Geschichte und Altertumskunde gyptens, 15 vols. (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 18961939)

Urk Urkunden des gyptischen Altertums

Wb Adolf Erman and Hermann Grapow, Wrterbuch der gyptischen Sprache

ZSZeitschrift fr gyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde

Editors Introduction

Hugh Nibley and the Joseph Smith Papyri

The title for this work, An Approach to the Book of Abraham , is an adaptation of one of Hugh Nibleys works on the Book of Mormon, An Approach to the Book of Mormon . a work that heavily influenced Nibleys approach in several of the studies included in this book. These studies reflect Nibleys early attempts to grapple with the Book of Abraham and the Joseph Smith Papyri. They still remain important discussions of things that must be understood before one can profitably discuss or study the Book of Abraham and its relationship to the Joseph Smith Papyri.

Nibleys work on the Joseph Smith Papyri and the Book of Abraham spanned four decades, resulting in an average of one book per decade. This book comprises mainly the preliminary studies of the first decade, the 1960s. First published in the middle of the 1970s, The Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri an edition, translation, and largely Egyptological commentary of Joseph Smith Papyri X and XImarks the second decade. revisiting and clarifying what he said on the subject earlier. After that time, up until about the time of his death, Nibley worked on what he came to call One Eternal Round . He turned the manuscript over to the editors on 10 October 2003. The manuscript filled four rooms in his house and totaled 31 file boxes. Additionally, there were nearly 650 electronic files of drafts of chapters and outlines. On 23 February 2005, the day before he died, it was decided in Nibleys presence that Michael Rhodes would edit and complete Nibleys work on the volume. If the delay seems long (publication is scheduled for 2010), at least the reader has some idea of what Rhodes has been up against.

For Latter-day Saints, Nibleys decades-long work on the Joseph Smith Papyri has made his name almost synonymous with the subject. Nibleys involvement with the papyri is not something that seems intuitive from his publications at the time the papyri were made available to the Church in late 1967. His academic work to that point had concentrated on the Roman world of the fourth century A.D. as well as on early Christianity. A historian trained in Classics is not an obvious choice to elucidate the meaning of a handful of Ptolemaic Egyptian papyri in hieratic. To see why Nibley was the only man for the job, one needs to know something of Nibleys preparation during the decade or so before.

Nibley and Things Egyptian

Hugh Nibley had tried to study Egyptian when he was a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley in Classics and history. The Egyptian expert there at the time was Henry Lutz, who was of the generation of orientalists who studied everything about the ancient Near East and dabbled in all the languages. Lutz and Nibley were not on good terms when Nibley was a student because Lutz did not like Mormons. Nibley took most of his Near Eastern language courses in Hebrew and Arabic from William Popper. Nibley tried to teach himself from the then recent first edition of Alan Gardiners classic Egyptian Grammar.