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Ex-Mormon Sues Over Joseph Smith’s Purported Translation of Egyptian Papyri

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The study of Ancient Egyptian civilization of course intersects with modern doings – think of how it’s inspired architecture of our time, or how it’s informed any number of pop culture creations . And yet, decorative use of hieroglyphs aside, it seems like it’s relatively uncommon for this aspect of reception history to involve the linguistic side of Egyptology. That’s part of why an ongoing class action lawsuit against the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is so interesting. Legal stuff can be complicated to parse for the untrained, and this U.S. case seems both particularly quixotic and particularly unruly. That said, it’s basically a 2019 class action lawsuit started by ex-Mormon Laura Gaddy and attorney Kay Burningham that’s expanded and shifted a bit over time and even suffered dismissal , although they’re now appealing so that they can file a third amended complaint. Nonetheless, amidst all of this thicket of procedural detail, one constant drumbeat is that ...
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Possible Linguistic Evidence for Egyptian’s Arrival from the West and Subsequent Absorption of Cushitic Speakers: A Tentative Reconstruction within Afroasiatic, Based on a Reanalysis of Ancient Egyptian for Auxiliary Verbs

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This blogpost is part of an ongoing research project reanalyzing Ancient Egyptian for auxiliary verbs. It expands on ideas presented at the Sixth Annual Missouri Egyptological Symposium (21 September 2024), including contemplation of possible links to other Afroasiatic verb forms (a line of questioning by Signe Cohen).   . . . A prehistoric scenario that bleeds a bit into historic times and begins to overlap with the dawn of Egyptian writing: Against a backdrop of hunter-gatherers and then herders wandering in a more-verdant climate, the 5 th millennium BCE aridification forced the linguistic ancestor of Ancient Egyptian into arriving from the West and setting up as what became the Naqada culture of Upper Egypt, a fateful development that would result in expansion into Lower Egypt, absorption of Cushitic-speaking peoples there, and a misleading geographical cleavage in a Berber-Semitic-Cushitic sub-branch of Afroasiatic, what with the remaining Cushitic peoples being strande...
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Egyptian Auxiliary Verbs as an Effect of Early State Formation?: Some Incipient Speculations on “Anciently Simplifying Egyptian” and “Shallower Egyptian, Shallower Afroasiatic” Hypotheses

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This blogpost is part of an ongoing research project reanalyzing Ancient Egyptian for auxiliary verbs. It expands on ideas presented at the Sixth Annual Missouri Egyptological Symposium (21 September 2024), including further clarification around conditions of simplification and provision of other examples thereof (issues raised by Julia Troche). Also contemplated are possible links to other Afroasiatic verb forms (a line of questioning by Signe Cohen). . . . Should we adopt a default working hypothesis, that Ancient Egyptian underwent intense simplification due to early state formation, alongside assuming that this reordering quickly submerged historically important linguistic features and created a deceptive appearance of chronological depth? Both of these theories presume but are of course strictly separate from the underappreciated point that the timeframes at play in Egyptian-Coptic historical linguistics are often the same as or are not dissimilar to better-researched language...
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