Miscellaneous Scraps of Book of the Dead for Semminis, circa 300–100 BC
Source Note
Miscellaneous Scraps of Book of the Dead for Semminis, [Thebes, present-day Luxor, Egypt, ca. 300–100 bc]; hieratic characters and partial vignettes; Egyptian Papyri, CHL. Includes nineteenth-century copies of characters.
Small scraps of papyrus pasted to approximately the top five inches of a leaf of nineteenth-century paper, measuring 10⅞–12½ × 3–7¾ inches (28–32 × 8–20 cm). Copies of hieratic characters are written on the lower half of the recto side. The verso is blank.
This leaf, known to scholars as fragment IX or the Historian’s Office fragment, bears wear and damage similar to wear on other such documents in church custody. The leaf was included on the 1956 microfilm roll of the Book of Abraham and Egyptian-language materials held by the Historian’s Office. In the late 1960s, two staff members of the Historian’s Office reported that this document had been in the church’s possession for much of the twentieth century, if not longer.
Rhodes, Michael D. Books of the Dead Belonging to Tshemmin and Neferirnub: A Translation and Commentary. Studies in the Book of Abraham 4. Provo, UT: Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, Brigham Young University, 2010.
See Copies of Egyptian Characters, ca. Summer 1835–C. One Egyptologist called these characters “only words and signs jumbled and even reversed.” (Ritner, Joseph Smith Egyptian Papyri, 152n10.)
Ritner, Robert K. The Joseph Smith Egyptian Papyri: A Complete Edition, P. JS 1–4 and the Hypocephalus of Sheshonq. Salt Lake City: Smith-Pettit Foundation, 2011.
Todd, “Background of the Church Historian’s Fragment,” 40-A.
Todd, Jay M. “Background of the Church Historian’s Fragment.” Improvement Era 71, no. 2 (Feb. 1968): 40–41.
Historical Introduction
The backing bears six small scraps of papyrus containing portions of chapters 3–6, 10–13, 16, and 125 of the Book of the Dead for Semminis and ten unknown scraps from the same text.
Ritner, Joseph Smith Egyptian Papyri, 159–165, 197, 199–200, 275–277, 280; see also Rhodes, Books of the Dead, 29–34, 56.
Ritner, Robert K. The Joseph Smith Egyptian Papyri: A Complete Edition, P. JS 1–4 and the Hypocephalus of Sheshonq. Salt Lake City: Smith-Pettit Foundation, 2011.
Rhodes, Michael D. Books of the Dead Belonging to Tshemmin and Neferirnub: A Translation and Commentary. Studies in the Book of Abraham 4. Provo, UT: Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, Brigham Young University, 2010.