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Editor’s Note: This article has footnotes. To review them, please see the PDF below.

These records were torn by being taken from the roll of embalming salve which contained them, and some parts entirely lost; but Smith is to translate the whole by divine inspiration, and that which is lost, like Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, can be interpreted as well as that which is preserved; and a larger volume than the Bible will be required to contain them.
—William S. West (1837)[

The Story So Far

Early in the second century B.C., an Egyptian scribe copied a Document of Breathing Made by Isis onto a roll of papyrus for a Theban priest named Hôr. Near the beginning of the document, the scribe penned the following set of ritual instructions: “The Breathing Document, being what is written on its interior and exterior, shall be wrapped in royal linen and placed (under) his left arm in the midst of his heart. The remainder of his wrapping shall be made over it.” Hôr’s mummy, with the Breathing Document enclosed, was buried in a pit tomb near Thebes, where it lay undisturbed for two millennia.

Sometime around 1820, Italian adventurer Antonio Lebolo exhumed a cache of mummies, including Hôr. After Lebolo’s death in February 1830, eleven of his mummies were sold to benefit his children. The mummies were shipped to New York and then forwarded to maritime merchants in Philadelphia, where they were examined by medical doctors and exhibited in the Philadelphia Arcade. At some point, the mummies were delivered to a traveling showman named Michael H. Chandler for further exhibition. Chandler reportedly unwrapped them in search of valuables. On two of the bodies, he found papyrus scrolls wrapped in linen and saturated with a bitumen preservative. As he extracted the Hôr scroll from its sticky encasement, the edges were torn, thus imprinting a repeating pattern of lacunae in the papyrus.

Chandler eventually made his way to Kirtland, Ohio, where he sold the Hôr scroll, along with four mummies, a Book of the Dead scroll made for a woman named Tshenmîn, a Book of the Dead fragment bearing the female name Neferirnûb, another fragment bearing the male name Amenhotep, and a hypocephalus belonging to a man named Sheshonk to Joseph Smith in July 1835 for $2,400. Shortly after the purchase, Smith claimed that one of the rolls in his possession contained a record of the biblical patriarch Abraham, which he began to translate by the gift and power of God. Although Smith died before he could finish the work, his partial translation of the Book of Abraham was canonized in 1880 as part of the Pearl of Great Price. In addition to five chapters of Jacobean English prose, the book includes facsimiles of three vignettes from the papyri: i.e., the hypocephalus of Sheshonk and the introductory and concluding vignettes of the Document of Breathing. The introductory vignette, labeled “Facsimile 1” in the canonized LDS Pearl of Great Price, is said in the text of the Book of Abraham to have appeared “at the commencement” and “at the beginning” of Abraham’s record (Abr. 1:12, 14). This and other evidence points to the Hôr scroll as the papyrus from which Joseph Smith claimed to translate the Book of Abraham.

Prior to Smith’s death, he or one of his associates glued the fragmented outer portion of the Document of Breathing onto stiff paper in an effort to preserve it. Some of the mounted fragments were then cut into shorter sections and preserved under glass. By mounting the outer sections, Smith et al. could work on translating the Egyptian characters without needing to roll and unroll the fragile scroll. After Smith was assassinated in 1844, the mummies and papyri were retained by his mother, Lucy Mack Smith, and briefly taken on an exhibition tour by Joseph’s only surviving brother, William. When Lucy died in 1856, Joseph’s widow, Emma, and her second husband, Lewis Bidamon, sold the artifacts to Abel Combs. Combs divided the collection into two parts. One part, including the intact interior portion of the Hôr scroll, he sold to Wyman’s Museum in St. Louis, which subsequently relocated to Chicago and burned in 1871. The other part, including the mounted fragments from the outer portion of the Hôr scroll, he retained and eventually left to his housekeeper, whose daughter’s widower sold them in 1947 to the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. The museum turned this portion of the collection over to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on November 27, 1967.

When the papyri were recovered by the Church, it was immediately evident that the Hôr scroll was the source of Facsimile 1. There are also several 1835 manuscripts in the handwriting of Joseph Smith’s known scribes that juxtapose the translated Book of Abraham text with sequential characters from the scroll’s extant instructions column, ostensibly as the source from which the translation was derived. Some LDS historians nevertheless maintain that the source from which Joseph Smith derived the Book of Abraham is not among the extant fragments, and that it was probably destroyed with that portion of the collection which burned in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. These authors have argued that the Hôr scroll was much longer in the nineteenth century than it is today and that the source text of the Book of Abraham may have followed the Document of Breathing on the now-lost inner portion of the scroll. In the view of these researchers, the Book of Abraham’s placement of Facsimile 1 “at the commencement of this record” should be interpreted to mean the beginning of the scroll rather than the record, and the juxtaposition of Breathing Document characters with the Book of Abraham’s English text in the handwritten manuscripts should not be understood to imply a translation relationship between the two.

The question then becomes whether the undamaged scroll of Hôr was ever long enough to accommodate a hieratic Book of Abraham source text. The main text of the canonized Book of Abraham contains 5,506 English words. The hieratic text in the instructions column of the Document of Breathing translates to ~97 English words. This column is ~9 cm wide. Hence, if the Book of Abraham was written on the scroll in the same hieratic font as this portion of the Document of Breathing, it would have taken up ~9(5,506/97) = ~511 cm of papyrus. Since the Book of Abraham translation is incomplete, the actual space required for a hieratic original would presumably have been even longer.

Recently, John Gee proposed that 1250.5 cm (41 feet) of papyrus could be missing from the interior end of the scroll of Hôr. This is obviously more than enough papyrus to contain the extant Book of Abraham. Gee followed an approach pioneered by Friedhelm Hoffmann, which takes advantage of the fact that “the circumference of a scroll limits the amount of scroll that can be contained inside it. Thus, we can determine by the size of the circumference and the tightness of the winding how much papyrus can be missing at the interior end of a papyrus roll.” Gee reported 9.7 and 9.5 cm as the lengths of the first and seventh windings, respectively, but offered no details concerning his method for identifying the winding end-points. When we attempted to replicate Gee’s results, we found that his measurements did not seem to be accurate and, in fact, required the papyrus to be impossibly thin.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a robust methodology that eliminates the guesswork in determining winding locations by visual inspection of crease marks or lacunae features, and to determine whether the missing interior section of the Hôr scroll could have been long enough to accommodate the Book of Abraham. Fortunately, this is a question that can be definitively answered by examining the physical characteristics of the extant portions of the scroll. The haste and greed of Michael Chandler provide the key to unlocking this mystery.

Editor’s Note: For the analysis of the scrolls, see PDF below.