(Continued from Part 3)

In the last parts of our series on the Egyptian hieroglyph of the ankh, and other related symbols, I’d like to look at where these symbols are found on the extant portions of the Joseph Smith Papyri, related documents, and the facsimiles of the Book of Abraham, to see if Joseph Smith was correct in any of his interpretations, or even on the right track.  I’ve written a brief into to these documents here.

As we’ve noted before, the themes that show up in the rituals of the Egyptians have unique parallels to our modern temple practices and ordinances.  This is not to be interpreted as an adoption of pagan rites, plagiarism of ancient rituals, or a belief in Egyptian polytheism, for the Egyptians had a corrupt imitation of the true order of God, and Joseph knew it.  Indeed, such attacks leveled at Joseph might actually be counterintuitive to our critics’ position, for such would mean that Joseph understood what he was looking at in the papyri, yet such inspired translation is precisely what our critics claim he could not do.  Note that the field of Egyptology had just recently been born in the 1820s, and the reading of hieroglyphics was only barely in its infancy in Europe at the time Joseph was translating the papyri in the 1830s, ruling out any scholarly approach to reading the papyri.  The critics have yet to explain, therefore, if Joseph did not receive the temple ordinances by revelation from God, and he could not read the papyri, then how did he teach temple rites that have remarkable parallels to the Egyptians which were written on the papyri?  Could he read the papyri or couldn’t he?  Either way our critics find themselves in a quandary.

Instead of being detrimental to Joseph, such a connection between the papyri and the temple actually serves as evidence of his divine calling, and that he was inspired to translate the papyri.  As in many instances of the early experiences of the prophet, Joseph had a question about something that he experienced in his life, and inquired of the Lord about it.  What followed was a restoration, through revelation, of the true and perfect ordinance or teaching of that particular thing.  The papyri quite possibly were such a springboard for the restoration of the temple endowment, as H. Donl Peterson has noted: 

The writings of Abraham and Joseph were purchased by the Church in July 1835 and the partial endowment was introduced to the brethren by the Prophet Joseph Smith in January 1836. Is this merely coincidental? Elder Bruce R. McConkie, referring to temple ordinances, wrote, “They were given in modern times to the prophet Joseph Smith by revelation, many things connected with them being translated by the Prophet from the papyrus on which the Book of Abraham was recorded.”

I don’t claim to be remotely experienced in Egyptology or hieroglyphics.  What the following represents is some observations that I have personally made.

Joseph Smith Papyri

First let’s look at where the ankh appears in certain fragments of the papyri which have been erroneously cited as the source of the Book of Abraham, since these fragments are the most popular.  These fragments, namely Joseph Smith Papyrus XI, and X, constitute a portion of an Egyptian text known in Egyptological circles as “The Book of Breathings Made by Isis” or “The Hor Book of Breathings.”  This text is an initiation text, as Nibley observed:

They were temple texts used in the performance of ordinances--”an inventory of the holiest mysteries,” the saving ordinances, which were “carried out or witnessed” by both the living and the dead. . . . showing how the business of awakening, washing, dressing, etc., of the king, carried out during the ceremonies of mummification, by way of preparing the dead to arise refreshed in the next world, “closely resembles the daily service performed in all Egyptian temples in historic times.”

…it is not only a funerary text but “a book of the living for conducting initiations here on earth.”

Nibley notes that these Egyptian funeral texts might all be called “Book of Breathings” since they all deal with a resurrection after death, a theme for which the Egyptians always used the word “breathing”:

…in a single intake one absorbs life, breath, nourishment, health, vigor--everything good.  The aim of the mysteries is “to give life and joy through the nose, and joy to the heart … ”

… the king is petitioned “to give the breath of life to him who suffocates” and spare the life of the servant … he is the creator, “Khnum, … who puts the breath of life in every man’s nose”… he is also “the living breath” of Ptah the creator; he is Horus of Edfu, who “puts breath into the nose of the dead”…

The Book of Breathings . . . is a sermon on breathing in every Egyptian sense of the word.

And so you get this theme throughout the text of the gods bestowing air, wind, or the “breath of life” upon pharaoh and his queen.  Since the ankh is the symbol that is often translated as “life,” it figures strongly whenever the “breath of life” is granted from the gods, usually “for time and eternity”.

But what is even more interesting to me is where the ankh is used in connection with the other symbols, the wedja (w3s) and seneb (snb), that we’ve noted is a regular occurrence in Egyptian writings.  This combination of hieroglyphs appears twice in the Joseph Smith Book of Breathings text.  According to Nibley, the section of the text in which they appear correlates with the Egyptian thought of triumph, coronation, mounting to heaven, and exaltation.  These glyphs are found on Joseph Smith Papyri X, column 4, lines 6 and 9, in the cursive hieratic script.

Line 6 reads (in the full Book of Breathings text):

Thou art (or Be) firm in possession of life [ankh], prosperity [wedja], health [seneb], remaining upon thy throne in the holy land (Deseret).

Here Nibley writes that “The life prosperity, health formula is that which is always placed immediately after the name of the king or the title of His Majesty.  This is enough in itself to indicate that the imagery of this section is that of the coronation since the formula is not applied to common mortals”.

Line 9 reads (in full):

It is Amon-Re who causeth thy ka, living [ankh], protecting [wedja], (or prospering) to flourish [seneb] in (or by) the Book of Breathings.

Nibley notes that this last line adds “living, protecting or prospering” after the ka symbol which does not occur in any other Book of Breathings manuscripts, possibly because “the writer placed the usual ‘nh-wd3-snb formula after the royal ka title from force of habit”.  The first edition of Nibley’s translation notes that this formula is usually “may it live, be prosperous, be healthy!”.  Additionally he says, “Life and health were mentioned together in the preceding line, recalling the well-known royal salutation of ‘life, prosperity, health!’  Here life (‘nh) and prosperity (wd3) are paired, suggesting the same royal theme.  This is confirmed in this passage by the only reference in the entire Book of Breathings to the ka, another sign of royalty…”.  The ka symbol happens to be a pair of upraised arms, “the highest expression of immortality”.

This formula is similar to that which appears on the Rosetta Stone in that it is followed by a pronouncement upon the king’s offspring, or posterity, for eternity in line 10:

Thy countenance liveth [ankh]; beautiful (perfect) is thy form (or are thine offspring); thy name shall be firmly established (or flourish) henceforward (every day).  Enter into the gods’ [domain]…

Next we will look at the facsimiles.

(To be continued…)

The Egyptian Ankh, “Life! Health! Strength!” – Part 4

The two symbols used for the commonly translated “time” and “eternity” are neheh (nhh) and djet (dt), respectively, and looked something like this:

Jan Assmann described the difficulty of pinning down an understanding of these hieroglyphics: 

The meaning of this disjunctive concept of time and its two components cannot be translated by any pair of words in Western languages. The Egyptian terms in no way correspond to our “time” and “eternity”; this distinction deried from Greek ontology (eternity as the punctually concentrated presence of being, which unfolds in time as the process of becoming) was not only foreign to Egyptian thought, but even contrary to it. Neheh and djet both have properties of our “time,” as well as of our “eternity,” and as a practical matter, either can sometimes be translated as “time” and sometimes as “eternity.”  The terms refer to the totality (as such, sacred and in a sense transcendent and thus “eternal”) of cosmic time.  To clarify this concept of time and its religious implications or semantic range, we must heed an important distinction.  We are so accustomed to the notion of infinity that we think of “totality” as finite and bounded. The Egyptians, however, viewed “totality” as the opposite of finite and bounded. To them, the boundaries of totality were not contrasted with the unbounded, but with the “whole,” with “plenitude.”

As foreign as these concepts seem to Western and modern thought, Assmann proposes further understanding, going back to the Book of the Dead:

In chapter 17 of the Book of the Dead, a compendium of Egyptian mortuary beliefs in the form of a series of questions and answers (an initiate’s examination?), the expression “all being” is explained as “neheh and djet.”  What this means is that neheh and djet designate the comprehensive and absolute horizon of totality.  They refer to the temporal totality of the cosmos, but it was in this way that the concept of “cosmos” or “being,” that is, of reality, was comprehensible to Egyptian thought and capable of articulation.  This totalization of being on the temporal level is so foreign to us that some scholars have proposed that djet and neheh mean “space” and “time.”  This is not correct, however; both are unequivocally temporal concepts, and in Egyptian thought, they represented the whole of reality.

So how are we to understand neheh and djet?

The closest we can come is a pair of concepts such as “change” and “completion/perfection” . . .

We can also illustrate the Egyptian disjunction of time with the help of the concepts “come” and “remain.” It is often said of neheh-time that it “comes”: it is time as an incessantly pulsating stream of days, months, seasons, and years. Djet-time, however, “remains,” “lasts,” and “endures.” It is the time in which we distinguish the completed, that which has been effected in the stream of neheh-time, which has matured into completion and has changed into a different form of time that will undergo no further change or motion.

The concept neheh can still best be connected with our everyday notion of time. For us, time is less something that comes than something that goes by, but in any case in motion. . . . djet signifies . . . the enduring continuation of that which, acting and changing, has been completed in time.

Modern Kemeticism offers more explanation:

The term neheh refers to the cyclical nature of time as expressed in the passage of seasons and celestial events, the time that is not linear, but goes in a spiral with the repetition of certain events: day and night, seasons, holidays, and the natural cycles of life. Neheh’s cyclical nature can be observed in the hieroglyphs that make up its symbol, all of which are characterized by curves or non-linear surfaces: the top wavy line standing for water, the two hieroglyphs at each side that are the wick of oil lamps that burn in the night, and the circle with a point in the middle, universal symbol of Ra, the sun itself. . . .

This term, djet, specifically refers to the concept of linear, or nonrepetitive time, and this can be seen symbolically in its hieroglyphs: the long, linear snake of the dj sound, the flat loaf of bread which supplies the feminine t ending, and the long island symbol being the determinative for “land.” Thus, djet is earthly time, the time of the land.

The sum of the two was always used to finish the ritual:

Djet and neheh are symmetrical concepts and are almost always used together, “eternity and everlastingness” in English, or perhaps the same as our idiomatic “forever and ever.” In ancient times, the act of ritual purification was shown with the gods pouring water jars containing the symbol ankh, or life, over the person being purified. A person was then said to be pure forever (djet) and ever (neheh), or in both manners of counting of time, both in years and in memory.((ibid.  See the second part post on the ankh for a representation of this.))

So we begin to get this conceptualization of a time which belongs to this earth, and a time that belongs to the cosmos, or celestial events, equinoxes, the movement of the sun and stars, etc.  Neheh is generational time and repeats, whereas djet is permanent and unchanging in eternity.  The model of “one eternal round” illuminates both views, eternal repetition and permanence (cf. 1 Ne. 10:19, notice also the dual usage of “times of old” and “times to come”; Mosiah 3:5; Alma 7:20; Alma 37:12; D&C 3:2; D&C 35:1; D&C 39:22; D&C 72:3; D&C 132:7, 18-19).  This also conveys the thought that the gods were capable of eternal change while still being unchanging, since both symbols were bestowed by them upon the kings and queens, the repitition of an enduring process ad infinitum.  This perception of time does not have a place in Western thinking, but hearkens back to the ancients.  Such an explanation of time seems perfectly in keeping with Abraham’s discourse on the multiplicity of time measurements in Abraham 3.  More home runs for Joseph Smith.

Of course, Hugh Nibley also adds his thought-provoking voice to the conversation:

Otto avers that, while nhh conveys the idea of “unending recurrence of the same, the concept of becoming, something like our ‘development,’” dt denotes “ineradicable endurance,” a state of being established to last forever. Thomas Allen’s translation of the Book of the Dead supports this, rendering nhh as “endless occurrence” or “endless recurrence” and dt as “changelessness.” … while A. Bakir has the idea that “… nhh connotes the concept of infinity associated with time before the world … came into being,” while “dt refers to the other infinity … the time when the temporal world comes to an end” … Gardiner has much the same idea, i.e., that dt is “eternity in the past” and nhh “eternity in the future” [see 1 Nephi 10:19] . . .  A clear distinction is made in Book of the Dead chapter 17: “Others . . . say that the things which have been made are Eternity (nhh), and the things which shall be made are Everlastingness (dt).” . . .

“The nhh-eternity thus designates the unceasing recurrence of the same, the endlessness of time.” He agrees with Thausing that nhh is divisible into years, while dt cannot be so divided. . . .

There is a general agreement that time as nhh has an end, being bound to the conditions and cycles of this world, whereas eternity as dt is something solid and final, written with the earth symbol, which denotes the ultimate in unshakable solidity.  But everyone seems to feel the rightness of both making a distinction and of closely associating the two ideas to make sure that the ordinances shall be effective both “in time,” by whichever means we choose to measure it, and “thoughout all eternity,” which is not to be measured at all.  This is the expression that closes all major ordinances . . .

Time and Eternity: An Egyptian Dualism