To start things off I'll present a little history in regards to the Papyri:
Between 1818 and 1822 Antonio lebolo worked as a superintendent of the archeological excavations in Upper Egypt for the french consul general, Bernardino Drovetti. During this period he discovered eleven mummies in a tomb in Thebes. In 1822 Lebolo returned to his native town of Castellamonte in Italy, taking these mummies with him. Sometime between then and his death on febuary 19, 1830, he arranged with Albano Oblasser Shipping Company in Trieste to sell the eleven mumies.
They were sent to New York City, where Michael H. Chandler purchased them in 1833 either for himself or acting as an agent for others. When he first obtained the mummies, Chandler, hoping to find something of value, unwrapped them and discovered several papyri. For the next two years he traveled throughout the northeastern United States displaying the mummies and selling one now and then as opportunity arose. In July of 1835 Chandler in Kirtland, Ohio, to display the mummies and papyri there. At this point he had only four of the original eleven mummies he had purchased in New York City. He met with Joseph Smith, who showed interest in the papyri, and Chandler decided to sell the remaining mummies and papyri to him for $2,400.
After Joseph Smith's death in 1844, the mummies and papyri remained in the possesion of his mother, Lucy Smith, until her death on May 14, 1856. On May 26, 1856, Emma Smith Bidamon, the remarried widow of Joseph Smith, sold them to Abel Combs. Soon thereafter Combs sold at least two of the mumies and several of the papyri to the St. Louis museum. In 1863 the museum was moved to Chicago, Illinois. The two mummies and some payri remained on display in the museum there until it was destroyed in the Chicago fire of 1871.
For many years it was assumed that all of the payri were destroyed in this fire. However, in 1966 Dr. Aziz Atiya, a distinguished professor of History at the University of Utah, found eleven papyri fragments in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art that were clearly part of the papyri that Joseph Smith owned. The museum donated these papyri to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in 1967, and they are now kept in the Church archives. Abel Coombs had, in fact, not sold al of the payri to the St. Louis museum but had kept some pieces that had broken off the main rolls and were mounted in picture frames. When he died, he willed these papyri to Charlotte Benecke Weaver, who had nursed him during the final ilness before his death. When Charlotte died, her daughter, Alice Heusser, inherited the fragments, and after her death her husband, Edward heusser, sold the payri fragments to the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1946.
These papyri fragments came from three seperate papyri rolls containing ancient Egyptian religious texts. One roll conatains a Book of Breathings, a sort of abbreviated Book of the Dead, that belonged to a man named Hor the son of Usirwer. There are two other rolls, each conataining Books of the Dead, one belonging to Tshemmin the daughter of Eskhons, and the other to a woman by the name of Neferinub. Joseph Smith also owned a third Book of the Dead belonging to Amenhotep son of Tanub, and a document that Egyptologists call a hypocephalus (Facsimile 2) that belonged to a man named Sheshonq, although these were not found among the Metropolitan Museum of Art fragments. On the basis of the handwriting, the historical period in which the religious writings on these papyri were in use in Egypt, and other historical references to at least one of the original owners of the papyri, these Egyptian documents can be reliably dated to somewhere between 220 and 150 B.C.
The Pearl of Great Price: a Verse-by-Verse Commentary, Draper/ Brown/ Rhodes, Deseret Book, 2005 pp.239-241
