Readers, please forgive me for my sloppy conclusions driven by my amateur apologetics orientation. It's time to admit I've made a significant blunder in evaluating the W.W. Phelps document that I discussed in my previous post, "Notebook of Copied Characters, circa Early July 1835." That  document, which occurs in a bound notebook, provides three lines of Egyptian text and four lines of English text, and calls the English a translation of the Egyptian -- as if Phelps understood that it might take around 40 or so Egyptian characters to equal 50 English words, not one character for a hundred or so words. However, I think I blundered when downplaying the emendation to the text.  As a reminder, here's the image of the English text from Phelps, complete with the emendation:



Here is a closeup of "in part":


When looking at this manuscript and the beginning of the Book of Abraham Manuscript C, shown below, where the very dark verses 1-3 are in Phelps' handwriting followed by much lighter writing by Warren Parrish, it seems that Phelps liked writing with strong ink. So why is "in part" so light?




Here's the Egyptian text that Phelps wrote on the next page of this notebook, also showing his penchant for writing in dark ink:


For his English comments, here is the transcript of page 1 as provided by the Joseph Smith Papers website for their Volume 4 on the Book of Abraham, as presumably edited by Brian Hauglid and Robin Jensen:

A Translation of the next page <​in part​>
Katumin, Princess, daughter of On=i=tas <​King​> of Egypt, who reigned began to reign in the year of the world, 2962.

Katumin was born in the 30th year of the reign of her father, and died when <​s​>he was 28 years old, which was <​the year​> 3020

Unfortunately, I think this is wrong. I'll show in a moment why I think a more accurate transcript would read as follows, with my changes highlighted in yellow:

A Translation of the next page ​in part​
Katumin, Princess, daughter of On=i=tas <​King​> of Egypt, who reigned began to reign in the year of the world, 2962.

Katumin was born in the 30th year of the reign of her father, and died when <​s>he was 28th years old, which was <​the year​> 3020

I realized this once I learned that scribal errors in the Kirtland Egyptian Papers were sometimes corrected by scraping off the ink and rewriting. Dan Vogel, for example, calls attention to the correction made by scraping off ink and repositioning a couple of Egyptian characters in the margins of the page 7 of Manuscript C in the handwriting of Warren Parrish. He makes a fair point that this shows attention to detail in aligning these characters with the text. What's interesting is that you can still see the ink after it has been scraped, but now it is much lighter:


Given that Parrish's writing was not as black as Phelps', it makes sense that an attempt to scrape away ink would leave a heavier stain in Phelps' case. We can see a correction in action in his English "translation" of Egyptian on page 1 of the notebook mentioned above. There's an obvious grammar error when he begins to write "she was 28th years old." It seems that he immediately realized that it should be 28, not 28th, and so, probably before he started "years," he took his knife or whatever he used to scrape ink, and scraped away the heavy "th" that he had just written. The ink appears to have still been wet, for he smears it downward, and a little pool is still left at the bottom of the scraping path. The result of this obvious emendation is that the "th" is still plainly visible, but so much lighter that we should readily understand it represents text that has been deleted. This is why, when I provided a transcript of the English in my previous post on this letter, I did not write "28th."


We can also see related corrections in his writing near the beginning of Manuscript C:



According to the transcript, Phelps wrote "desiring one <​to be​> one". Instead of striking out the premature "one" and commencing after the strike out, it appears that "one" has been made lighter, presumably by scraping, allowing him to just write over it with "to be."

Turning our attention back to Phelps' emendation of "in part", note that it has about the same darkness as this scraped "one" above and the scraped "th" from "28th," though it lacks the smearing of the latter, probably because the ink was more dry when he changed his mind. When did that change occur? When I look at the backside of the notebook page in question, I can see ink that has gradually diffused into the paper for much of his writing (but probably not the scraped "th" of "28th"). This process, in my experience, takes a number of days with good paper. There is no sign of ink bleeding through from "in part," which to me suggests it happened fairly soon after being written, but not immediately as in the "28th" error.  

In any case, I believe the best way to treat "in part" as an emendation is to recognize that it is a deletion, consistent with other scraped deletions he has made, not an insertion in what might be unusually light ink for Phelps. [Correction, April 23, 2019: I have since learned that the very light "in part" may actually be pencil, which would indicate that it was in fact added some time -- days? weeks? -- after Phelps penned his original statement. See my update at the top of this post for discussion of the implications. The Phelps document remains critically important.]

Why did Phelps change his mind? Perhaps he was going to write more Egyptian on the next page, and instead just stuck with what he thought he or someone else had translated. Perhaps he was going to write less English, but decided to show the whole text. I'm not sure, but I think it's fair to read this as a deletion of "in part," not an addition.

For confirmation, I think we should do some microscopic analysis. There are some light spots that show up in the scraped "in part" as if the high parts of the paper are being scraped more effectively than the low spots. More scientific analysis of the document could surely confirm the nature of the "in part" text, but for now, I feel the best hypothesis is that this emendation represents a deliberate deletion.

This may be a disappointment to those who insist that "everyone knows" that Phelps and Joseph Smith thought a single character could represent hundreds of English words. But remember, Joseph Smith or a scribe (probably with his approval, of course) spoke of "characters" in the plural representing a name in the comments on Facs. 3. And when Joseph saw the four Egyptian figures that we now know are the sons of Horus on Facsimile 2, he did not say that these characters represented a huge chunk of text, but said that they were "the four quarters of the earth," which is one of the interesting bulls-eyes in the comments on the Facsimiles. The explanations of the figures and characters on the Facsimiles are short and sweet, not pages of text. And when Phelps discusses actual translation of Egyptian, he equates 40-something characters to around 50-words of English. Still compact, comprehensive, impressive, but not bizarre.

Many thanks to a kind anonymous reader whose comments called me out for underplaying the "in part" that W.W. Phelps had written. I hope you'll understand that my mistake was understandable, for his "in part" was so light, it was easy to miss and really looked like it was written long after he had penned his original statement in bold, dark ink. So naturally but wrongly, I made too much of the difference in inks and argued that there must have been a long delay after writing the translation of the Egyptian text before he began thinking that maybe there was more to translate. But it was probably the same ink after all.

So again, my apologies for being absolutely wrong about the emendation by Phelps. "In part" did not come later, as I thought, but most likely was written in the same sitting as the rest of that page in his notebook, and indicates that his four lines of English do, apparently in full, represent the three lines of Egyptian characters that followed. While he may have thought there would be more Egyptian on the following page, or less English that he could share, he appears to have changed his mind. And so, a bit embarrassed but hoping for your forgiveness, I admit I was wrong once again.

Update, April 23, 2019: In my comments about Joseph Smith's views on the translation of Egyptian, I've drawn upon some posts from Val Sederholm's blog, I Begin to Reflect:

Now note how the Prophet Joseph Smith describes the title page of the Book of Mormon. When speaking of the particular gold plate that made up Moroni's ancient title page, the Prophet correlates one plate to one page. And bear in mind that each plate was 6" in width, 8" in length, and that the English translation of the title page comprises a heading and two paragraphs. Again, here is no mystical, pre-decipherment "reading" of hieroglyphs as Symbol in which each sign contains of itself sufficient capacity to supply many sentences of esoterica or of Scripture. 

No. 

But the drumbeat continues: Joseph Smith held that a single Egyptian sign packs in a verbal outpour. That's what everyone believed back then, we are told. He accordingly wrestles with each little character, for each unfolds vistas of narrative, vision, and doctrine. 

That may describe Athanasius Kircher (it doesn't); Joseph Smith can speak for himself. And his comments on the Book of Mormon title page date from 1838/1839, three to four years after he translated the first chapter of the Book of Abraham, and three years before he translated the rest! Brother Joseph, who compares the Egyptian writing on the last plate to "all Hebrew writing in general," sees all hieroglyphs, formed or reformed or whatever, as a "running" script. That's his word. "Running": nothing could be more clear (Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Joseph Smith, 60-61; History of the Church 1:71-72 = "History of the Church," Book A-1, 34-35.).

For Joseph Smith, then, should we follow his own crystalline descriptions of the nature of Egyptian writing, the 11 pages of unbroken narrative that make up the content of the published Book of Abraham would have been translated from several continuous, and presumably intact, sheets of papyrus (the translations tellingly show no gaps). Now, that's not theory ("the missing roll theory"), that's how Joseph Smith himself describes the nature of hieroglyphic text. 

The fragmentary Book of Breathings thus has nothing to do with the making of the Abraham narrative.  

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