Provenance of the Book of Abraham Papyri

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Provenance of the Book of Abraham Papyri

Summary: One of the important questions that any student of the book of Abraham must gain a knowledge of is the historical provenance of the papyri that Joseph Smith possessed and the papyri that the Church possesses today. It is known that Joseph Smith worked with more papyri than what the Church possesses in its historical archives today.

This article aims to trace the historical provenance of the papyri.

From Bonaparte to Joseph Smith

Joannes Petros Antonius Lebolo (known mostly as simply “Antonio Lebolo) was an Italian “antiquities dealer working under the consul general of Egypt.”[1] Lebolo had agreed to enlist in the French army after Napoleon Bonaparte and his troops invaded Italy at the very end of the 18th century. With the conquering of Italy, Napoleon turned his attention to Britain. “He knew that if he conquered Egypt, he could seriously jeopardize Britain’s lucrative overland trade routes to India. Besides, the French vividly remembered that the British had driven them from India about fifty years earlier and laid claim to their conquest.”[2]

On July 1, 1798, Bonaparte crossed the Mediterranean and landed with his 38,000 troops at Abu Qir Bay in Egypt. He took with him a wide array of experts to survey and document this mysterious land they had arrived at. The French quickly captured Cairo and had taken Egypt in the span of three weeks. They worked their way to upper Egypt towards Karnak and ancient Thebes from whence the Joseph Smith Papyri would be unearthed years later. Britain would quickly regain control of Egypt. On August 1, 1798, a month after the French had landed, the British found and razed the French’s naval vessels anchored in Abu Qir. In 1799 and at the age of eighteen, Lebolo volunteered to be a part of the French army at this time when they were trying to protect Egypt from British recapture.[3] Bonaparte abandoned his army and fled Egypt on August 19, 1799.[4] Lebolo would continue to fight in the French army but was discharged in 1801 after being injured in battle.[5] He would be made part of the French police following his discharge.

After an unsuccessful campaign to take more of Europe and Russia, Bonaparte abdicated as leader of the French forces and was exiled to Elba in 1814. He would escape Elba in 1815 where he tried one last conquest, but was defeated in the same year by the British and exiled to Saint Helena where he died.[6] With Bonaparte’s fall came the fall of French control of Italy. Those that served in the French army were labeled “Bonapartists” and looked down on.

Like many other Bonapartists of his time, Lebolo looked to Egypt as a frontier for discovery and income. Lebolo had a friend that served with him in the military named Bernardino Drovetti. Drovetti had remained in Egypt after his wartime activities and employed Lebolo to excavate. One of their excavations in Thebes gave us the papyri that we have today. Lebolo was allowed to keep some of their spoils as payment for labor. Richard Bennett writes: “Before his death in Castellamonte on 18 February 1830, Lebolo, who had fallen on hard times financially, authorized his shipping agents, Albano Oblasser in Trieste and Francesco Bertolo in Philadelphia, to sell several of his remaining mummies with various papyrus scrolls therein to anyone who would pay a decent price. After their arrival in the United States in the spring of 1833, at some point a man named Michael Chandler took charge of the collection of artifacts.”[7] In the collection were 11 mummies and several fragments of papyri.[8] “In early July of 1835, Joseph Smith (with the assistance from Joseph Coe, Simeon Andrews, and others) paid Chandler $2,400 for four mummies and at least four papyrus documents, including two or more rolls of papyri.”[9] The eyewitness testimony confirms that the papyri bought by Joseph Smith can be sorted into four groups.[10]

There were:

  1. Some papyri that was preserved under glass.
  2. A long roll of manuscript from which Joseph Smith is said to have translated the book of Abraham.
  3. Another roll of papyrus. To prevent further damage to these two rolls, their outside portions were separated, mounted on paper, and placed in glass frames in 1837.[11] The remaining portions of the rolls were kept intact.[12]
  4. Per Oliver Cowdery, “Two or three other small pieces of papyrus with astronomical calculations, epitaphs, &c.”[13][14]

From Joseph Smith to the Church

Before his death, Joseph gave the papyri and mummies to Lucy Mack Smith (Joseph's mother). When she died in April 1856, Emma Smith (wife of the Prophet) retained ownership of the antiquities with her new husband Lewis Bidamon. They, in turn, sold the collection to a man named Abel Combs a dozen days after they obtained it.

Combs separated the antiquities when he sold some of the rolls and two mummies to the St. Louis Museum (otherwise known as the Wyman Museum or Koch Museum) just weeks after he acquired them from Emma Smith and Lewis Bidamon. The St. Louis Museum sold the papyri to (what was at that time called) the Chicago Museum by 1863 (it would later be bought by Joseph H. Wood and renamed the Wood Museum in Chicago aka Col. Wood's Museum). The Chicago Museum was destroyed in the Chicago Great Chicago Fire.

The other portion of the papyri (presumably the ten fragments that ended up being given to the Church) were passed from Combs to his housekeeper Charlotte Beneke Weaver when Combs died in 1892. Charlotte passed away in 1915 and the papyri were taken into the possession of Alice Combs Weaver. After Alice died, Alice's surviving husband, Edward Heusser, was able to sell the papyri fragments to the Met in 1947. University of Utah professor Aziz S. Atiya discovered the fragments (with the help of the Museum's curators) and helped to transfer them to the Church in 1967.[15]

Transferred to the Church were ten papyrus fragments. The Church joined the ten fragments with a fragment it already possessed and published the 11 fragments in its flagship magazine, The Improvement Era. Those fragments can now be viewed in high resolution on the Joseph Smith Papers website.

The fragments have been labelled with Roman numerals as Joseph Smith Papyri I–XI.

Ancient Owners of the Papyri

John Gee explains:

From the names, titles, and genealogies written on the Joseph Smith Papyri, we know their ancient owners were Egyptian priests who lived in Thebes in Egypt. The surviving fragments of the Joseph Smith Papyri come from two papyrus rolls. Only one of these preserves the beginning of the manuscript which contains the name, titles, and full genealogy of the owner. His name was Horos. The other document, belonging to Semminis, is missing both its beginning and end and so we have neither a full list of titles nor a full genealogy for her. The genealogy and list of titles along with other documentation allows us a fuller understanding of the owners . . .The owner of Joseph Smith Papyri I, XI, and X was Horos. He left enough information to identify himself as a specific individual, because although his name was common, he had a very unusual title . . .He served as prophet in three different temples in the Karnak temple complex. He was prophet of Amonrasonter at the main Karnak temple, prophet of Min-who-massacres-his-enemies at the Montu temple on the north of the main complex, and prophet of Chespisichis to the southeast of the main complex. As prophet, he was a spokesman for various gods, who interacted with prophets on a regular basis . . .The other owner of surviving texts from the Joseph Smith Papyri (II–IX) was Semminis, whose mother was Eschons. Semminis was the chantress of Amonrasonter at Karnak, which seems to be the highest female priestly office at Karnak but may mean merely that she was married to a prophet. Lack of positive unique identifiers makes it difficult to distinguish Semminis from or identify her with any other Semminis in Ptolemaic-period Thebes. So, ironically, though more of her papyrus is preserved than Horos’s, we actually know less about her.[16]


Notes

  1. ↑ John Gee, A Guide to the Joseph Smith Papyri (FARMS, 2000), 1.
  2. ↑ H. Donl Peterson, The Story of the Book of Abraham: Manuscripts, Mummies, and Mormonism (Deseret Book, 1995), 37–38.
  3. ↑ Peterson, Story, 37.
  4. ↑ Peterson, Story, 40.
  5. ↑ Peterson, Story, 37.
  6. ↑ Peterson, Story, 41.
  7. ↑ Richard E. Bennett, “Lebolo, Antonio,” in Pearl of Great Price Reference Companion, ed. Dennis L. Largey (Deseret Book, 2017), 197.
  8. ↑ Peterson, Story, 79.
  9. ↑ John Gee, An Introduction to the Book of Abraham (Religious Studies Center and Deseret Book, 2017), 4.
  10. ↑ Gee, An Introduction, 5. See also John Gee, “Eyewitness, Hearsay, and Physical Evidence of the Joseph Smith Papyri,” in The Disciple as Witness: Essays on Latter-day Saint History and Doctrine in Honor of Richard Lloyd Anderson, eds. Stephen D. Ricks, Donald W. Parry, and Andrew H. Hedges (FARMS, 2000), 175–217.
  11. ↑ Kerry Muhelstein and Alexander L. Baugh, "Preserving the Joseph Smith Papyri Fragments: What Can We Learn from the Paper on Which the Papyri Were Mounted?" Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 22, no. 2 (2013): 66–83.
  12. ↑ Gee, An Introduction, 4–5.
  13. ↑ Oliver Cowdery, Letter to William Frye, 22 December 1835; rep. Oliver Cowdery, "Egyptian Mummies," Messenger and Advocate 2, no. 3 (December 1835): 233–37.
  14. ↑ A fuller collection of eyewitness testimony of what papyri and mummies were bought can be found at "Book of Abraham Translation," Mormonr, accessed July 15, 2025, https://mormonr.org/qnas/Rqa6Tb/book_of_abraham_translation.
  15. ↑ Gee, An Introduction, 7–9.
  16. ↑ Gee, An Introduction, 59–63.
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