Tuesday, January 10, 2023

Any Egyptian Script being Called "Hieroglyphics" by non-specialists

  In a journal entry from October 9, 1962, David O. McKay recorded the following:


October 9, 1962, 7:30-8:15 a.m. Elder Nathan Eldon Tanner called in company with Dr. Ebeid Sarofim, an Egyptian, Professor of Law at the London University, who is visiting Salt Lake City. . . . Dr. Sarofim presented me with a very old edition of the “Koran” in Egyptian h[ie]rogl[y]phics. (Confidence Amid Change: The Presidential Diaries of David O. McKay, 1951-1970, ed. Harvard S. Heath [Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2019, 445; Heath notes [ibid., 445 n. 42] that “The diary has ‘hyroglphics.’”)

 

This is a good example of how common it is for non-Egyptologists (including Joseph Smith) to refer to anything Egyptian as "hieroglyphics" even when the script it not actual hieroglyphics but other scripts, such as hieratic, demotic, and Coptic.