Facsimile No. 3 printing plate reveals jackal head Anubis

[_fetchface]

I always wondered why that slave guy had that piece of hair sticking up! I just thought he woke up that way and no matter how much he licked his hand and tried to push it down, it just would pop up again a few minutes later and so he gave up on it.

[_Shulem]

Anubis with a single ear just like Facsimile No. 3

Parallels, parallels! If apologists can use them so can the critics!

In your face, Hugh Nibley!



https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fayum-75.jpg

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

Maybe another thought that has been bouncing around my noggin... Did Joseph Smith remove the part of the papyrus that showed the jackal head? Because if what's-his-face created the wood carving that originally showed Anubis with a jackal head then it follows the papyrus had it, too.

- Doc

[_abinadi_fire]

I give it 3 at this point Paul.

[_Shulem]

Interesting find, Paul. Of course we shouldn’t expect Smith to leave a jackal’s head in a “restored” story about Abraham.

The theory that Smith tore off and disposed of the scraps that are now lacunae may not necessarily be harmful to his cause - imagine the prophet with righteous indignation uttering oaths about scheming, evil Egyptian scribes replacing Abraham’s original message with stories of jackal-headed false gods! - as he rightfully and carefully disposes of the disintegrating fibers torn from the papyrus.

Then, turning to his stone, asks of the Lord to reveal the original and oh! aren’t we thankful for a prophet?

Believe me, I can imagine and did just that back in the day when I was a raving lunatic apologist trying to defend Joseph Smith. Yes, the prophet studiously and most carefully copied hieroglyphic characters from a funerary scroll and placed them upside down in the Facsimile No. 2. lucuna while filled with the Holy Spirit. That's right, Egyptian hieroglyphic characters upside down! Imagine that! I can. Can you?

[_Shulem]

I give it 3 at this point Paul.

That's mighty generous of you. Thank you for sharing your opinion.

[_Shulem]

When one feels inspired to change a document in order to make one's claims about the document seem more believable, one is engaging in forgery.

Further investigation will shed light on this matter but it's a process and will require time. The LDS cult owns the woodcut and it's only available to faithful scholars who have testimonies that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God no matter what the evidence may suggest.

Joseph Smith didn't have any qualms about changing something to suit his own fancy. The man was a thief, a liar, an adulterer, and a child molester.

[_Symmachus]

Thanks Fence Sitter and Shulem for addressing my questions so lucidly and thoroughly.

So I understand how confirmation bias could come into play here but this is Anubis and unless one could come up with another vignette from a similar time period showing Anubis drawn this way, without a snout, I think one has to conclude it was removed.

Now the question is who and when. Given that the entire area around the snout remains Egyptologically consistent I think we can conclude the snout was there when it arrived in Kirtland, now as to why it isn't in the reproduction of the facsimile, it would have to be Hedlock on his own (doubtful) or per instructions from Joseph Smith at the time Joseph Smith reviewed the carving. I am betting on the latter.

There is absolutely no question but that Anubis should be there, and on Shulem's scale, I would say I am a 9.

The question for me is whether Smith removed the snout to make it look more human in order to make his "Olimlah" plausible, or whether the image as we have it is the result of some other process. That to me is a bit harder to settle definitively. The thing about the ear is relevant to me because it suggests that the original was perhaps not as thoroughly drawn as some of the other Anubis images I can find. So while there may have been a jackal snout there, it might not have been as clearly drawn, and Smith, knowing nothing about Egyptian funerary texts or Egyptian religion, might have assumed it was just a poorly drawn person and corrected it accordingly. So, to an Egyptologist or someone who has looked into images of Anubis in funerary texts, it is obvious that this would have been Anubis, but that doesn't mean it would have obviously looked like a dog-headed person to the poorly trained, especially if it was poorly drawn. Or there could have been damage to the manuscript or to the image on the manuscript (a smudge?), and Smith best approximated what he thought it was. Isn't that the case with Facsimile 2, for example, where Anubis's head, missing from the manuscript, was sketched in as the wicked priest of Elkenah or something? I think that an examination of the original woodcut, along with a comparison of Anubis images in texts of this sort, would go along way to clearing up the confusion, and it's too bad the Church won't let anyone look at it.

[_The Dude]

Thanks Fence Sitter and Shulem for addressing my questions so lucidly and thoroughly.

So I understand how confirmation bias could come into play here but this is Anubis and unless one could come up with another vignette from a similar time period showing Anubis drawn this way, without a snout, I think one has to conclude it was removed.

Now the question is who and when. Given that the entire area around the snout remains Egyptologically consistent I think we can conclude the snout was there when it arrived in Kirtland, now as to why it isn't in the reproduction of the facsimile, it would have to be Hedlock on his own (doubtful) or per instructions from Joseph Smith at the time Joseph Smith reviewed the carving. I am betting on the latter.

There is absolutely no question but that Anubis should be there, and on Shulem's scale, I would say I am a 9.

The question for me is whether Smith removed the snout to make it look more human in order to make his "Olimlah" plausible, or whether the image as we have it is the result of some other process. That to me is a bit harder to settle definitively. The thing about the ear is relevant to me because it suggests that the original was perhaps not as thoroughly drawn as some of the other Anubis images I can find. So while there may have been a jackal snout there, it might not have been as clearly drawn, and Smith, knowing nothing about Egyptian funerary texts or Egyptian religion, might have assumed it was just a poorly drawn person and corrected it accordingly. So, to an Egyptologist or someone who has looked into images of Anubis in funerary texts, it is obvious that this would have been Anubis, but that doesn't mean it would have obviously looked like a dog-headed person to the poorly trained, especially if it was poorly drawn. Or there could have been damage to the manuscript or to the image on the manuscript (a smudge?), and Smith best approximated what he thought it was. Isn't that the case with Facsimile 2, for example, where Anubis's head, missing from the manuscript, was sketched in as the wicked priest of Elkenah or something? I think that an examination of the original woodcut, along with a comparison of Anubis images in texts of this sort, would go along way to clearing up the confusion, and it's too bad the Church won't let anyone look at it.

The idea that someone hacked away the jackal's snout is intriguing. The pictures in the OP let the imagination run wild. But I can't get over the head spike that everyone assumes is a leftover ear. I think, if you propose the snout was removed with intent, you also have to explain why the head spike was intentionally left behind. Otherwise the hypothesis is incomplete and I couldn't go above a 3 on Shulem's scale.

[_Symmachus]

The idea that someone hacked away the jackal's snout is intriguing. The pictures in the OP let the imagination run wild. But I can't get over the head spike that everyone assumes is a leftover ear. I think, if you propose the snout was removed with intent, you also have to explain why the head spike was intentionally left behind. Otherwise the hypothesis is incomplete and I couldn't go above a 3 on Shulem's scale.

That is true: why not finish the job? Perhaps we are assuming too much competence and consistency from a guy who had a vision of God and Jesus...I mean only Jesus...well maybe it was just an angel.

I await Adam Miller's book on this topic, wherein he will find deep meaning in Anubis's missing snout. Through a series of Proulx-esque metaphors, Cormac McCarthyisms, and homages to David Foster Wallace, he will reveal how the gospel bridges the gap between our effaced identities: the time when we were premortally with god, the time now when we are mortally without him, and the time to come when we will be within him—and he within us in the endless immortalities of eternity. Somehow, despite and/or because of ourselves, we are lit by the fire of things remembered yet only grasp the smoke of forgetfulness. The gospel shows us how we are all Olimlahs, and Anubis's snout, like a phantom limb that scents salvation under a yogurt-colored moon, is nothing less than our remembered forgetting of God, whom we have forgotten to remember in the wane hours of this palimpsest mortality.