Every item marked opened was fetched and read in the session that wrote the article. Items marked cited through an intermediary were reached only through another source's bibliography or footnote and are named in the article as such, never quoted.
Primary documents
The Joseph Smith Papers, "Book of Abraham and Related Manuscripts" — the introduction to Revelations and Translations, Volume 4. Opened: https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/intro/introduction-to-revelations-and-translations-volume-4. This is the single most important source in the file and it is the Church's own documentary edition. It supplies the 1835 purchase narrative, the Chandler certificate and the editors' assessment of it, the inventory of surviving fragments, the statement that "the majority of the papyri originally purchased in 1835 are missing," the Warren Parrish and W. W. Phelps statements, the Woodruff and Pratt "Urim and Thummim" reports, the Orson Pratt reminiscence, the Cleveland Whig squib, and — decisively — the statement that the Kirtland Book of Abraham manuscripts carry Egyptian characters in the left margin, "Most of these characters were copied from the papyri." Used throughout.
The Joseph Smith Papers, "Egyptian Papyri, circa 300–100 BC." Opened: .../paper-summary/egyptian-papyri/1. Supplies the date range, the Theban provenance, the Drovetti family-vault reconstruction, Oliver Cowdery's December 1835 description of "two rolls of papyrus" plus small pieces, the 1837 mounting on repurposed paper, and the roll-length estimates: Hor at 150–156 cm originally with ~66 cm extant, Semminis at ~300 or ~700 cm with ~92 cm extant. This is the paragraph that makes the missing-scroll section decisive, because it shows the Church's edition using Baer's number rather than Gee's.
The Joseph Smith Papers, "Book of Abraham and Egyptian Material" index page, and the source notes for Book of Abraham Manuscript A (Frederick G. Williams), Manuscript B (Warren Parrish), Manuscript C (Parrish and Phelps), Egyptian Alphabet A, the Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language, and the Copy of Hypocephalus. Opened. The Manuscript A source note is quoted in the article for its statement that characters from the Book of Breathing for Horos were copied into the margins. The Grammar and Alphabet note supplies the volume's earlier use in the 1833 Bible-revision indexing project.
Not obtained: the JSP page-level transcripts of the manuscripts. The paper-summary pages return source notes but the transcript panel did not come through the text extractor. The article therefore relies on Baer's character-by-character matching rather than on quoting a transcript line.
Pearl of Great Price, Facsimiles 1, 2, and 3 with the explanations, and Abraham 1 and 3. Opened at churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/pgp/abr/. All facsimile explanations quoted in the article and in the comparison table are verbatim from these pages.
"Translation and Historicity of the Book of Abraham," Gospel Topics Essays. Opened (cached text from a prior session's fetch, re-read in full here). Source of every quotation attributed to the Church's official treatment.
Egyptological scholarship
Klaus Baer, "The Breathing Permit of Hôr: A Translation of the Apparent Source of the Book of Abraham," Dialogue 3, no. 3 (Autumn 1968): 109–34. Opened — full PDF, text-extracted. The foundational translation. Supplies: the figure-by-figure reading of Facsimile 1 (Anubis, lion-couch, four sons of Horus as canopic lids, offering stand, human-headed ba, crocodile, palace-facade panel); "He is, of course, not holding a knife"; the admission that Baer himself first "saw" a falcon head before reading Nelson; the finding that the vignette "was probably in essentially the same condition in 1835 as it is now, and the restorations ... are not copies of the missing parts"; the figure-by-figure reading of Facsimile 3; and the roll-length estimate of "about 150 or 155 cm." Also the decisive demonstration that several character groups Joseph Smith copied and translated were his own restorations of already-existing lacunae and match nothing that was ever on the papyrus.
Robert K. Ritner, "The 'Breathing Permit of Hor' Thirty-four Years Later," Dialogue 33, no. 4 (Winter 2000). Opened — full PDF, text-extracted. Ritner is Baer's successor at Chicago and had access to Baer's notebooks. Supplies: the confirmation that changes from Baer "are few and do not challenge his basic understanding of the text"; the Quaegebeur/Coenen redating to the first half of the second century BC, described as "controversial, though possible"; the transliteration and translation of the Facsimile 3 labels naming Osiris, Isis, Maat, Hor, and Anubis; the explicit rebuttal of Joseph Smith's Facsimile 3 identifications; the rejection of Gee's "320 cm" roll estimate; and the answer to Nibley on the 1912 Spalding respondents and on the "beautifully written" objection.
Andrew W. Cook and Christopher C. Smith, "The Original Length of the Scroll of Hôr," Dialogue 43, no. 4 (Winter 2010). Opened — full PDF including the technical analysis. Supplies the whole missing-scroll arithmetic section: the 5,506-word count for the Book of Abraham, the ~97-English-word count for the instructions column, the ~511 cm space requirement, Gee's reported 1250.5 cm and his 9.7/9.5 cm winding measurements, the autocorrelation method, the four thickness estimates and the reason for rejecting the outlier, the 0.0701 cm final thickness, the ≤56 cm result, and the reconstruction of Baer's estimate as 59 cm for direct comparison. Also the provenance chain from Lebolo through Combs to the Metropolitan Museum and the 27 November 1967 transfer.
John A. Wilson and Richard A. Parker, Dialogue 8, no. 2 (Summer 1968). Their identification of the fragments is cited through an intermediary — Ritner's account of it. The 1968 issue PDFs were downloaded but not read for this draft.
Robert K. Ritner, The Joseph Smith Egyptian Papyri: A Complete Edition (2011). Not obtained. Signature Books' free online library has been reorganised and the volume was not reachable. The article therefore cites Ritner's 2000 Dialogue article for everything attributed to him and does not cite the 2011 edition at all. This is the largest gap in the file.
Michael D. Rhodes, The Hor Book of Breathings (2002) and Books of the Dead Belonging to Tshemmin and Neferirnub (2010), and his 1977 BYU Studies hypocephalus translation. Cited through an intermediary — Gee's and Cook and Smith's bibliographies. The BYU Studies page for the 1977 article was opened but the text is not digitised and the PDF was not reachable. Rhodes is used in the article only for the fact that a Latter-day Saint Egyptologist published the standard editions, which is stated in Gee's own book.
Latter-day Saint scholarship
John Gee, An Introduction to the Book of Abraham (BYU Religious Studies Center, 2017). Opened — eleven chapters fetched in full from rsc.byu.edu, which hosts the book free. This is the source for every Gee position stated in the article, in his own words rather than a critic's paraphrase: the translation timeline with the journal entries; "The Book of Abraham is not on the surviving fragments of the Joseph Smith Papyri"; the long-roll eyewitness argument; the mounted-in-1837 argument; the Phelps-authorship caution about the Egyptian-language documents; the concession that Abraham 1:12 and 1:14 are visibly later insertions in the earliest manuscript; the Willard Richards sketch showing damage Hedlock filled in on Facsimile 2; the demotic love-charm papyrus with Abraham's name under a lion-couch scene; the "pupil of the wedjat-eye" material; the mismatched-illustrations argument from Hor's own Book of the Dead; the angel-versus-God argument about Abraham's deliverance; and his own verdict that "for none of the theories is the evidence as neat or as compelling as one might wish."
John Gee, "Some Puzzles from the Joseph Smith Papyri," FARMS Review 20, no. 1 (2008). Not obtained. The BYU ScholarsArchive record page was reached but the PDF endpoint returned HTTP 202 with a zero-byte body on repeated attempts, and no mirror was found. Gee's roll-length numbers are therefore reported in the article as Cook and Smith report them, with attribution made explicit. This should be fixed before publication.
Kevin L. Barney, "The Facsimiles and Semitic Adaptation of Existing Sources," in Astronomy, Papyrus, and Covenant (2005). Cited through an intermediary — Gee's summary of Barney's thesis in the Introduction's further-reading section, quoted as Gee's summary and labelled as such in the article.
Kerry Muhlestein, Violence in the Service of Order (2011), and Muhlestein and Gee, "An Egyptian Context for the Sacrifice of Abraham" (2011). Cited through an intermediary — Gee's bibliography. Used only for the uncontroversial point that ritual killing in Egypt is now a documented subject, which the Church's essay states independently.
Hugh Nibley, The Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri (1975). Not opened. Nibley's positions are reported as Ritner and Gee report them, and both are named in the article at each point.
Attila Engin on Oylum Höyük / Ulisum; Paul Hoskisson and John Tvedtnes on a northern Ur. Cited through an intermediary — Gee's bibliography.
Not consulted, and why it matters
- Brian Hauglid's later public reassessment. Hauglid co-edited the JSP volume this article leans on hardest and has since stated publicly that his view of the Book of Abraham's origins changed. That is directly relevant to the marginal-character section and was not reached in this session.
- Christopher C. Smith, "The Dependence of Abraham 1:1–3 on the Egyptian Alphabet and Grammar," JWHA Journal 29 (2009). Known through Cook and Smith's footnote 19. This is the specific textual-dependence argument and its absence is why the article argues from Baer's character matching instead.
- Edward H. Ashment, Sunstone 1979 and Dialogue 33/4. The 33/4 PDF was downloaded but not read.
- The 1912 Spalding pamphlet, Joseph Smith, Jr., as a Translator. Known only through Ritner.
Aggregators
None used. FAIR, Scripture Central, MormonThink, and the CES Letter were not consulted for any fact in this article.
2026-08-08 citation pass — what was opened, and what still is not
The article had no footnotes and no quotes.md before this pass. It now carries 118 footnote marks, a ## Sources section, and a full quotation ledger. Everything below was opened and read on 2026-08-08.
| Source | Route | What it argues, and its reason | How the article uses it |
|---|---|---|---|
| "Translation and Historicity of the Book of Abraham," Gospel Topics Essays (2016) | churchofjesuschrist.org | The papyri surviving today are a fraction of what Joseph Smith owned, so the translation cannot be assessed against them; the book's status rests on faith. | Quoted throughout, and quoted against itself where its own concessions are stronger than its defence. |
| Baer, Dialogue 3:3 (1968), 109–134 | Journal HTML transcription, notes included | The Hor papyrus is a Breathing Permit; Facsimile 1's damage predates 1835 and the restorations are guesses. His reason is direct examination of the papyrus and its backing sketch. | The Facsimile 1 analysis, the marginal-character matching, the Facsimile 3 reading, and the roll-length reconstruction. |
| Ritner, Dialogue 33:4 (2000), 97–119 | Journal PDF | Baer was right; better photographs change little. The Egyptian labels on Facsimile 3 name Osiris, Isis, Maat, Hor, and Anubis. His reason is the legible text on the engraving. | The line-by-line Facsimile 3 comparison and the answers to Nibley and to the 1912-amateurs objection. |
| Cook and Smith, Dialogue 43:4 (2010), 1–42 | Journal PDF | No more than ~56 cm can be missing from the Hor roll. Their reason is a correlation analysis of the repeating tear pattern, which removes the eyeballing in Gee's winding measurements. | The whole missing-scroll arithmetic section. |
| The Joseph Smith Papers, Revelations and Translations, Vol. 4 | josephsmithpapers.org — editorial introductions and the Manuscript A source note | The fragments are third-to-first-century BC funerary texts; the Kirtland manuscripts carry papyrus characters in a ruled margin; the roll was 150–156 cm. Its reason is the editors' own collation of the Egyptological literature. | The dating, the marginal characters, the alphabet-and-grammar description, the 1835 reaction quotations, and the roll length. |
| Gee, An Introduction to the Book of Abraham (2017) | Free full text at rsc.byu.edu | The Book of Abraham is not on the surviving fragments; the source was on a lost papyrus; illustrations in Egyptian papyri routinely do not match adjacent text. | The "strongest case" section, the Latter-day Saint responses, and — repeatedly — Gee's own concessions. |
| Pearl of Great Price, Abraham and Facsimiles 1–3 | churchofjesuschrist.org | The published explanations themselves. | Every figure identification quoted in the article. |
The Joseph Smith Papers tooling problem, and how it was handled
bin/pagetext.py does not work on josephsmithpapers.org: the transcript lives in a __NEXT_DATA__ JSON payload, and scraping the rendered page silently promotes struck-through words into the reading text. Document transcripts were therefore read with bin/jsptext.py, which marks cancellations. The only Joseph Smith document quotation this article needs — the history's "continually engaged in translating an alphabet" — is quoted from the Gospel Topics essay instead, which sidesteps the problem entirely. The Joseph Smith Papers material used here is editorial prose, which carries no cancellations but does embed biography popups; those were stripped before checking so that no popup text could be spliced into a quotation. No quotation in this article carried a canceled word.
Sources sought and not obtained
- Rhodes, The Hor Book of Breathings (2002), and Books of the Dead Belonging to Tshemmin and Neferirnub (2010). These are the Latter-day Saint editions of the papyri and would let the article show the agreement between Latter-day Saint and non-Latter-day Saint Egyptologists from the primary editions rather than from the Gospel Topics essay's summary. The largest remaining gap.
- Kevin L. Barney, "The Facsimiles and Semitic Adaptation of Existing Sources." The article calls Barney's model the most serious answer to the facsimile problem and then evaluates it from Gee's one-sentence summary. It should be read directly.
- Chris Rogers's counterpart in this field does not exist, but Ritner's 2011 book edition of the papyri does, and was not obtained.
- Josephus, Antiquities 1.8, and Eupolemus. The availability of the Abraham-astronomy parallel to Joseph Smith is one of the article's own arguments and currently rests on an unopened source.
- The Leiden and London demotic magical papyrus, the best single item on the Latter-day Saint side, reaches the article only through the Gospel Topics essay and Gee.
- Muhlestein, Violence in the Service of Order. Used only as the essay summarizes it.
- The 1842 Times and Seasons printing, Warren Parrish's 1838 letter, and Joseph Smith's 1835 journal. All quoted at one remove, each flagged in the footnote.
- Nibley, The Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri (1975), and Spalding's 1912 pamphlet. Not opened; the article's treatment of both is second hand.