Talk:Joseph Smith Hypocephalus

Provenance?
What were the circumstances behind the discovery of this artifact? Where is the original? Has its authenticity been verified by non-Mormon researchers? Is this thing recognized by mainstream Egyptology? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.228.53.57 (talk) 13:27, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

For reference in case anyone else has the same question: by my understanding, it was alongside the original papyri purchased by Joseph Smith, and from the same source. The original, as with the original to Facsimile 3 and quite possibly a lot of the papyrus, is lost (possibly burnt), but two direct copies (the original verion of the woodcut and the KEP copy drawing) remain. Researchers on both sides of the argument accept the thing as an actual hypocephalus, but some contend that lacunae were filled badly, and the scholarly interpretation differs from (but does not necessarily clash with) Joseph Smith's interpretation. Hopefully this is explained fairly well by the articles in question (Joseph Smith Hypocephalus, Joseph Smith Papyri and Book of Abraham), otherwise we have a problem. Also, this comment does not count as a citable source. -- Thomas.hori (talk) 20:36, 21 April 2014 (UTC)

Confusion
So I'm confused, is that what Joseph translated? Or is this what Egyptologists have translated it to be? j_lechem@msn.com (talk) 18:58, 20 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Its what Egyptologists translated it to be - which is the only real correct translation. Joseph Smith's translation is complete nonsense compared to what we know about Egyptian characters. --71.218.199.172 (talk) 07:41, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

This whole article is majorly incomprehensible, i followed it from a mormonism page and now i'm left wondering if joseph smith was 4000 years old or what 89.101.30.226 (talk) 19:26, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

The page has now been moved to try to alleviate the "Hypocephalus of Joseph Smith" confusion. -- 92.20.232.159 (talk) 21:37, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

Update: the page has been moved back due to "Joseph Smith Hypocephalus" being the commonly used name. -- Thomas.hori (talk) 11:54, 21 April 2014 (UTC)

What is this article about?
I'm confused. How come is this figure named after Joseph Smith? What does it have to do with his religion? What is its historical context? Who made the paper copy? WHAT IS THIS ARTICLE ABOUT?

I have never found a Wikipedia article where I left it knowing less than I did before, but this one is dangerously close to doing just that. Tebello TheWHAT!!?? 19:49, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

The page has now been moved to try to alleviate the "Hypocephalus of Joseph Smith" confusion. -- 92.20.232.159 (talk) 21:37, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

Update: the page has been moved back due to "Joseph Smith Hypocephalus" being the commonly used name. -- Thomas.hori (talk) 11:54, 21 April 2014 (UTC)

Confusion
As the original author of this article I will attempt to answer the question of what it is.

There are many discussions of the Joseph Smith Hypocephalus and most of them get hopelessly bogged down in arguing over whether or not Joseph Smith had any idea what he was talking about (was a faker/fraud) in his explanations of the figures. This article is an attempt to get past the biased rhetoric and address the question of what the figures actually represented to the Egyptians who created them, so that interested persons can compare and draw their own conclusions of just how close or far off Joseph Smith was in his explanations.

Most people who have not studied Egyptian religious beliefs have no idea how broad and deep the symbolism in these texts is, or how to interpret them. Even the statement that they can be "translated" or that Joseph Smith "translated them" misses the mark. By way of illustration; If you showed a Peanuts cartoon strip to an Aboriginal Australian they might recognize the images of a dog or a small fat child, but they could not tell you who the dog and child were, their relationships or their roles in the stories, eg; that Snoopy plays at being a World War I flying ace or that Lucy always pulls the football away from Charlie Brown.

The figures on Egyptian funerary documents told a story that was rich in symbolism with layers of meaning. With the translation of other documents, like the Egyptian Book of the Dead (the Papyrus of Ani for example), and understanding of how the vignettes associated with the texts illustrated the associated story, it is possible to compare Joseph Smith's explanations of the images and what modern Egyptologists have to say. The reader is left to compare them and draw their own conclusions.DWmFrancis (talk) 18:41, 24 November 2009 (UTC)


 * While I admire the level of detail here, I am guessing there will be many people who don't like this article. You haven't asked for advice and I hope I don't step on anyone's toes, but here are some of my opinions (you can also check the style guide: WP:STYLE).
 * First, the article could use more clarifying explanation for those with no background in Mormonism or Egyptology. This doesn't need to be exhaustive.
 * Second, improve the readable flow of the article by breaking it into sections, like:
 * Origin (From Joseph Smith papyri, etc. You already briefly address the original owner and its first publication.)
 * Significance (To Mormonism and its critics. To Egyptologists.  How is it talked about and used?)
 * Interpretations (The "Figure" sections could be listed as sub-sections within this area.)
 * Third, change the style of the Figure tables since they don't currently conform with a typical Wikipedia table. It looks like everything is bolded, centered, and in large blocks of text, which I don't think is easy on the eyes.  You could break the text into individual interpretations in separate cells, to more easily show the authorship for each explanation.
 * {| class="wikitable"

! Figure 99 ! Michael Rhodes ! John Gee ! Robert Ritner ! Other Egyptologists ! Joseph Smith | | Has Rhodes commented on all these figures? | Has Gee ever commented on the Hypocephalus figures? | ''What about Ritner? Are there other key Egyptologists involved that should be included?'' | What about other Egyptologists that have voiced an occasional opinion without analyzing the whole comprehensive subject? | What did Joseph Smith write about it?
 * }
 * Or they could be grouped, while carefully identifying each person:
 * {| class="wikitable"

! Figure 99 ! Mormon Egyptologists ! Non-Mormon Egyptologists ! Joseph Smith | | ''Rhodes said this... Gee said this... Nibley said this... (others at FARMS, FAIR, etc.)'' | ''Ritner said such and such... The Smithsonian published such and such... Some other guy explained such and such'' | What did Joseph Smith write about it?
 * }
 * Fourth, I'm guessing it's hard to avoid original research here, so defend your article with copious in-line citations. I see interpretations that have no citation, so I don't know if they're legitimate.
 * Fifth, I'm still unsure whether people want so much detail in an encyclopedia article, so I recommend focusing on how all these pieces of information are necessary to the discussion. ——Rich jj (talk) 02:04, 31 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Many-column tables with the image to the left do not work properly on mobile devices. The tables that were actually present also seemed to be more of a kluge to align the images with the section (which can in fact be accompolished with

). Accordingly, tables are no longer used for the present coverage of the images, but only to align the text scans with each other and provide parallel transtaion where applicable. -- Thomas.hori (talk) 11:53, 21 April 2014 (UTC)

Still missing some very fundamental points
As others have pointed out, this article leaves the reader with many unanswered questions, mostly centered on why this is called the "Joseph Smith" Hypocephalus. Did he discover it? Was he an archeologist? Did someone give it to him for his birthday and he decided to have a go at translating it? (I'm assuming he translated it, although this article does not specifically say "Joseph Smith, in such and such a year, published a translation" or anything similar). Does the resulting translation have some significance to the Mormon Church? I would assume so, but the article gives no clue. The article certainly doesn't have to give the (presumed) Smith translation undue weight compared to that of others, but to not mention Smith's connection at all is confusing to me, and it would appear to others as well.--NapoliRoma (talk) 04:42, 13 June 2011 (UTC)

The page has now been moved to try to alleviate the "Hypocephalus of Joseph Smith" confusion. -- 92.20.232.159 (talk) 21:39, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

Update: the page has been moved back due to "Joseph Smith Hypocephalus" being the commonly used name. -- Thomas.hori (talk) 11:47, 21 April 2014 (UTC)

Origin & Identification
This article needs a much clearer introduction, as others have said. There's some basic information available on an apologetics website ('fairwiki') which would be very useful: that this hypocephalus, no longer extant, was purchased by Joseph Smith (founder of Mormonism) about 1835 in the United States as part of a collection of papyri and mummies; it had been found in 1818 (as already stated in this article). Though it is no longer extant, a purported facsimile was published by Smith (this is already stated); it has subsequently been known as the 'Joseph Smith Hypocephalus' because of this connection, and because Smith's interpretation of the disc is of significance to Mormonism. See this page -- http://en.fairmormon.org/Book_of_Abraham/Joseph_Smith_Papyri/Identity_and_nature -- apparently citing as its source for the provenance information, a work on the history of Mormonism by Smith himself. Oh, I now see that this article should be linked to --

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Smith_Papyri

-- which has a lot of this background info. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.181.47.197 (talk) 17:51, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

Stupid article
What a ridonkulously stupid article. Anyone who hasn't completed a Ph.D. in Mormon Apologetics at BYU will come away completely and utterly mystified and befuddled by this article. What did Joseph Smith have to do with this hypocephalus? Did he claim to have found it? Seen it in a dream? Did he buy it? Was its translation revealed to him by God? Do real Egyptologists consider this thing an actual artifact or a forgery? Is the translation genuine or a fraud? Why did Hugh Nibley spend the better part of several decades writing about this tiny little thing? Does anybody who's not Mormon care? I'm confused. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.89.150.163 (talk) 07:32, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

The page has now been moved to try to alleviate the "Hypocephalus of Joseph Smith" confusion. -- 92.20.232.159 (talk) 21:39, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

Update: the page has been moved back due to "Joseph Smith Hypocephalus" being the commonly used name. -- Thomas.hori (talk) 11:47, 21 April 2014 (UTC)

Some but not all of Joseph's explanations?
Is there a good reason why Figures one and two have Joseph's interpretation next to the explantion but none of the others do? -- Thomas.hori (talk) 07:26, 15 March 2014 (UTC)

(Note that the others have now been added.) -- 92.20.232.159 (talk) 21:40, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

hydrocephalus?
Okay, I now accept that Joseph Smith Hypocephalus is the common name.

But is a hyPocephalus and not a hyDRocephalus. And for some reason attempts to move it accordingly are denied. -- Thomas.hori (talk) 22:37, 18 March 2014 (UTC)

Update: this is now fixed. HyDRocephalus is the medical disorder and hyPocephalus is the Egyptian artifact, do try to get this straight! -- Thomas.hori (talk) 11:46, 21 April 2014 (UTC)


 * My mistake. It was late. Fluid was leaking on the brain. Mistakes were made. Good Ol’factory (talk) 04:36, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

The Prodigal Returns
My apologies for ignoring this article for so long (yes, there is life outside the wiki/web) and thanks for the re-formatting and cleanup by others. I'm hoping all the previous objections have been addressed (provenance, etc.) Again. my purpose in creating it was to address what I saw as a glaring hole in the other articles related to the subject, which typically got bogged down in trying to compare literal translations of the text with Joseph Smith's statements, while ignoring the meanings associated with the images as understood by modern Egyptologists. DWmFrancis (talk) 23:11, 19 April 2015 (UTC)

A careful examination of the references reveals many problems
This hypocephalus is a hotly contested topic inside and out of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but I think there's one thing we can all agree on:

The references in this article stinks.

Almost the entire thing is a an egregious example of WP:SYNTH (see the first example in the given link as a comparison).

Let's do an example paragraph (from Figure 7):


 * A seated figure with the tail of a falcon, symbolic of the supreme celestial deity, with a human head and a pharonic beard. This figure has been identified with Min, a predynastic god who was usually depicted as a mummy wrapped ithyphallic man with his legs bound together, wearing a twin plumed crown with long streamers and with his arm raised to the square, a gesture identified as the Sign of Preservation. Behind his head is an inverted V. A right angle projects to the right of the shoulder. To the left is a figure with a bird's head, presenting the Eye of Ra.  In the hypocephalus of Tashenkhons, the figure on the left is Nehebu-Kau, whose name meant "he who harnesses the spirits" and the inverted V is a flail, symbolic of provenance.

Not a single one of these references has anything to do directly with the Joseph Smith hypocephalus. There are 3 dictionaries, a book on Egyptian secret signs, and a link to a website about two other hypocephali not related to this.

As presented, this wiki article makes very specific claims that are not backed up by the references. According to WP:OR, we cannot draw conclusions that aren't contained in the actual sources. We need more sources from Egyptologists. Michael Rhodes is the only Egyptologist cited, and he's from BYU. Can't we get some sources that have non-Church affiliated Egyptologists directly interpreting the Joseph Smith papyri?

I putting the OR tag on here. As this is a highly-watched article, I'm sure someone will respond quickly. I'd like to remove all synthesis article, but I won't proceed without consensus.

Edit: Can't we use the Ritner as a reference? It's paywalled for me so I can't read it, but if someone has access, that'd be great.

Edit edit: Actually, I see this article isn't really updated all that often. I'll be WP:BOLD and remove all unsourced material. I went and bought the Ritner book to use. Brirush (talk) 03:50, 6 July 2020 (UTC)


 * Please be bold. I agree with everything you mentioned. This article has been on my to do list for over a year.  Epachamo (talk) 20:47, 10 July 2020 (UTC)