While I
never accepted the mnemonic device theory for the Book of Abraham, proposed in
the 1960s by John Tvedtnes (who would later reject it for the “missing scroll”
theory [a variation of which I hold to]); Richley Crapo, and Benjamin Urrutia, I
do believe that critics (and even some members of the Church) has not given it
a “fair shake” if you will, with some (e.g., the Tanners) grossly misunderstanding and misrepresenting the theory in their published works. Mnemonic devices were very common in antiquity, so
there was nothing wrong in a proposal that the Book of Abraham was preserved
using such. As one scholar of Mesopotamia wrote, which is rather apropos:
Precisely because pictography is imperfect
and rudimentary on the level of meaning and incapable of reconstructing the
completeness of a concrete situation, of depicting it, or of communicating it,
but is able only to extract from it the material objects and the substantial
elements, it can absolutely not play the role of teacher or informer vis-à-vis the
“reader.” It cannot reveal to him in a precise fashion a truth that he did not
know, but only remind him of an event, or a string of events the details of
which he was already informed of before. I may very well accumulate pictograms,
and use them with all the resources possible from within the system, but I will
not arrive at anything more than if I would put forward in speech only “full
words” and nothing else—or if I would compose a very nice small picture in the
manner of an Aztec “codex.”
To walk,
mountain, to purchase, bread, woman is nothing but a quintessential diagram, of
which the only unquestionable elements are that it deals with walking, with a
mountain, who purchasing, with bread, and with a woman. But who walks and who purchases? And when?
And how many realities are at work?
Is the mountain the starting point or
the goal of the walk? Is the woman,
like the bread, the object of the
purchase, or is she its destination,
or its source? On the other hand, if
I had the experience during a vacation in the mountains of buying a particular
loaf of bread, or several of them, in order to take them to my wife, these five
words should suffice to make me remember all of it, in the case that I would
have forgotten it, or that I would have lost sight of some detail.
This is why and how cuneiform script in its
first stage of pictography, was and could not have been more than a mnemonic device. (Jean Bottéro, Mesopotamia: Writing, Reasoning, and the
Gods [trans. Zainab Bahrani and Marc Van De Mieroop; Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1992], 78-79, italics in original)
For more on
the mnemonic theory, see:
John A.
Tvedtnes, The
Use of Mnemonic Devices in Oral Traditions, as Exemplified by the Book of
Abraham and the Hor Sensen Papyrus
John A.
Tvedtnes (transcribed by Kerry Shirts), Mnemonic
Device of Egyptian Alphabet & Grammar and Joseph Smith translation of the
Book of Abraham
Richley
Crapo (ed. by Kerry Shirts), Background
Information on Finding the Mnemonic Device in the Book of Abraham
Benjamin
Urrutia, The
Joseph Smith Papyri
