PacMan's "dismantlement" of this "pit" is an interesting outlier in Mormon apologetics. Instead of arguing that Smith couldn't have known something, PacMan argues that Smith must have known it. Instead of insisting that evidence is needed to prove that Smith ever actually saw something which could in principle have been available in his surroundings, PacMan assumes that if it was published before 1835 then Smith must have seen it, and denies that evidence is needed to show that Smith actually did see it.
That dramatic turnaround is not in itself any big problem with PacMan's argument. PacMan is not logically required to follow any patterns set by other Mormon apologists. It's just amusing to note.
What PacMan says is that Smith cannot really have meant that his paragraphs of English text were the translations of the single hieroglyphs that he drew beside them, because (PacMan says) Smith must have known that hieroglyphs were phonetic signs like the letters of our own alphabet, with each one standing not for a sentence, or even a word, but merely for a sound. PacMan's argument for this conclusion is that Martin Harris knew from his earlier visit to Anthon that hieroglyphics had been "discovered by Champollion in Egypt". If Smith's circle knew the name "Champollion", PacMan argues, then they cannot have supposed that individual hieroglyphs could be translated into long sentences.
I have read exactly one short book on hieroglyphics, but it's quite a nice one:
Hieroglyphs Without Mystery by Karl-Theodor Zauzich. The full story of how hieroglyphics were fully deciphered is more complicated than PacMan seems to suppose.
The first thing that should always be explained about the decipherment of hieroglyphics, but rarely is, is that it was possible to decipher hieroglyphics merely by code-breaking because the language that was written with hieroglyphics turned out to be a language that was dead as a spoken language but still well known to scholars, namely Coptic. Coptic as a language had survived the demise of the hieroglyphic alphabet and many texts in Coptic were written using other scripts. Many scholars, including Champollion, could read Coptic fluently.
The hypothesis that the ancient Egyptian language might have been just an early form of Coptic had been made before Champollion, and so had the hypothesis that perhaps some of the mysterious ancient Egyptian glyphs were phonetic rather than ideographic. Champollion was the fluent Coptic scholar who brought enough code-breaking skill to the job to crack the cipher of hieroglyphic symbols into Coptic phonemes and then show, by unraveling hieroglyphic inscription after hieroglyphic inscription into sensible Coptic texts, that the Coptic hypothesis and the phonetic hypothesis were both actually true.
It took quite a while, though, before all the dust settled and everyone agreed that Champollion was simply right. The complications were these.
First of all it's not quite true that hieroglyphs are phonetic. They mostly stand for individual sounds, like our letters, but they were also occasionally used as ideograms, kind of as abbreviations. If the word you wanted to use happened to be the thing that one of the hieroglyphs physically looked like, like a bee or a bird or whatever, then you could just use the hieroglyph to represent the whole word. Some hieroglyphs are also grammatical, indicating things like gender and number. Some were "determinatives" that indicated categories; the "striking man" hieroglyph, for example, is appended to pretty much any word that has to do with some form of violence. So there was some fuzziness among Egyptologists over just how phonetic hieroglyphs were, because there was some fuzziness among Egyptian scribes about how phonetic they were.
Secondly there are three different ancient Egyptian scripts: hieroglyphic, hieratic, and demotic. The hieratic characters look like sloppily written hieroglyphs, and the demotic ones even more so, kind of like the relationship between printing and handwriting in our scripts. It turns out that all three were in simultaneous use to represent the same language. Hieroglyphics were carved into stone, the priests wrote on papyrus in hieratic, and everyone else wrote demotic. This wasn't at all clear to early Egyptologists, however. The plausible theory that held up for a long time was that the three scripts represented successive eras. A further natural refinement of this theory was that the transition from hieroglyphics to demotic script was also a transition from ideograms to phonetic letters, so that hieroglyphics were pure ideograms, demotic characters were letters, and hieratic characters were an intermediate stage.
This mistaken understanding of successive stages in Egyptian writing, and not Champollion's correct understanding of three simultaneous alternative alphabets, is what is clearly presented in the text that PacMan quotes (my bold added).
PacMan wrote:The North American Review, beginning from 1823, repeatedly covered the progress of Egyptian. In 1831, it published the following:
"But we can conceive, that the different stages of the written language denote the successive improvement in the art of reading, that is, of converting the written into the spoken language. From using the whole of the picture for the whole of the sound, the progress is natural to using a part of the picture for a part of the sound ; and in the final result of this progress, we find alphabetical writing deduced from hieroglyphical. The recent discoveries in Egyptian hieroglyphics fully establish this, as the order of improvement. We find not only hieroglyphical signs employed as alphabetical characters, in their original shape of animals, plants, utensils, &c. ; but we also find a sort of popular current alphabet formed out of the hieroglyphic, merely by a more compendious delineation."
The 1831 text from the North American Review is a little hard to read correctly these days. We've had some dialect drift. But the passage clearly
contrasts "hieroglyphical" writing and "alphabetical". It does not reflect Champollion's confirmation that hieroglyphs themselves were already (mainly) alphabetical. Instead it represents the mistaken common theory that hieroglyphs were pure pictograms and the other Egyptian scripts were later alphabetical developments that began by re-purposing some of the hieroglyphs as phonetic letters and then gradually morphed their shapes into simpler forms.
So, far from demonstrating that Smith "must have known" that hieroglyphs were phonetic, the passage the PacMan quotes from 1831 really confirms (of course) Ritner's statement that no-one in Smith's time and place had any idea how to read hieroglyphics.
The real smoking gun for ignorance of Egyptian is that nobody in Smith's circle ever mentions Coptic. If you know that hieroglyphs stand for sounds, not for ideas represented pictorially, then it's obvious that the hieroglyphics can only mean anything at all by representing the sounds of words in some spoken language, so the question of what language that was comes immediately. Only if you still think that the hieroglyphs are pictorial representations of ideas, showing little symbolic scenes, would you be able to talk at length about the meaning of hieroglyphics without mentioning their language.
Coptic was the language that the hieroglyphics were used to write, and it was an independently known ancient language with lots of extant medieval texts in more modern scripts. It was not simply the unique ancient language of the hieroglyphs, any more than English is the language of Times New Roman. Talking about translating hieroglyphics without mentioning Coptic is like talking about deciphering a coded diary by Leonard da Vinci, or someone, without mentioning that the encoded language was Homeric Greek. If you don't talk about Coptic when you talk about translating hieroglyphics then you really cannot have a clue about the job.
