Friday, October 12, 2018

Mnemonic Devices in Antiquity and the Mnemonic Device Theory for the Book of Abraham


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:




Benjamin Urrutia, The Joseph Smith Papyri