Martin Harris took the “caractors” to Professor Anthon in New York in the spring of 1828, so the “caractors” were probably written by Joseph Smith sometime between then.

Thanks for the comment, and your emails too – I’ll be posting on the subject again very shortly.

My primary interest (as a non-Mormon historian) is simply to see how the Anthon Transcript “works” in and of itself, to try to find out what the primary document itself has to say. Once I have that kind of thing in place, I’ll move on to all the rest of the literature – thanks for the suggestions!

Cheers, ….Nick Pelling….

I did some looking around on Wiki. The Mormon Church made a replica of the “Golden Plates” which I find quite amusing. Former VMs student Robert Firth once told me that the Mormon position seemed to be that the “Reformed Egyptian” script was hieratic Egyptian, but I certainly don’t see this either.

Joseph Smith made a translation of a specimen of the Egyptian Book of the Dead that he called The Pearl of Great Price and is now official Mormon scripture. This is not even as dignified a mistake as the spurious interpretations of the Pyrgi tablets or the Phaistos Disk. We’ve seen this sort of thing enough, of course, but how people can overlook such damning evidence is frankly beyond me.

I found a reference to the Voree plates, a set that James Stang, one of Joseph Smith’s claimed successors “translated.” Here are facsimiles of these plates. The characters look more cursive and simpler to me than those in the Anthon transcript.

How such obvious rubbish as all this could become the foundation of a major religion seems a fascinating topic in itself, though not one for this forum.