The article starts out with the discovery of the Rosetta Stone.

Here is an excerpt:

The deciphering of the hieroglyphic code was not good news for everyone. The nineteenth century was the height of Egyptomania, and anyone who was anyone wanted to acquire antiquities for their personal collections or see the “exotic” treasures of ancient Egypt. Among them was Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. In 1835 Smith acquired some papyri from a traveling mummy exhibit. Smith called it the “Book of Abraham” and claimed that it was a translation of writings of Abraham from his time in Egypt (as described in the book of Genesis). Smith went on to describe the content of the papyrus as including, among other things, an account of the cosmos and its creation and performed his own translation of it. In 1880 the papyrus was canonized by the LDS Church and is influential on Mormon doctrine to this day.

Unfortunately for Smith, once non-Mormon Egyptologists were able to read hieroglyphics and then examined the papyri (commonly referred to as the Joseph Smith papyri), it turned out that the papyri were fragments of ancient Egyptian funerary texts including the Breathing Permit of Hôr and the more famous Book of the Dead. In 1912 Arthur Cruttenden Mace, an Assistant Curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, published a letter in which he stated that Smith’s Book of Abraham was “a pure fabrication.”

http://www.thedailybeast.com/inside-the-deadly-pursuit-of-unsolved-languages

There is also an interesting footnote about AI languages where machines have now developed their own communications that we are unable to translate.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/06/2017 08:44AM by Eric K.

Awesome read Thanks Erik