If the writings beside Facsimile 1 identify Abraham, Chaldea, and the opening movement of Abraham’s story, why does the CES Letter treat the papyri as if only the surface funerary text matters?
The CES Letter says the Book of Abraham fails because Egyptologists can read the surface text.
But that’s just the surface layer.
Ptolemaic Egyptian writing embedded deeper meaning and understanding under surface area code. And on this papyrus the characters beside Facsimile 1 appear to preserve the name Abraham, the place Chaldea, and the opening movement of Abraham’s story through a layered code.
If this is correct, the entire CES letter premises of the Book of Abraham being incorrectly translated is instantly debunked..
The CES Letter frames the Book of Abraham as a simple mismatch: Joseph Smith produced the Book of Abraham, modern Egyptologists translate the surviving fragment as funerary material, and therefore Joseph failed. But that framing assumes the fragment has only one level of meaning.
Ptolemaic Egyptian can utilized complex coding that scholars in Joseph Smith’s day knew nothing about.
The characters beside Facsimile 1 work through layered sign values, sound play, visual associations, rebus readings, and theological coding. A character cluster can carry more than one meaning at once. The surface text may be funerary, while a deeper symbolic layer carries names, places, ritual movement, and sacred narrative.
That layered structure matters because the proposed reading does not merely discover a loose Abraham connection.
It identifies the name.
Abraham Identified on the Papyrus
Characters 4 through 9 reportedly supply the consonantal cluster j / b / r / ḥ or h / m, which can be read as jbrhm, Ibrahm, or Abraham. That alone is significant. But the coding does more than name Abraham.
The earlier cluster points toward Kasdim, the land of the Chaldeans. In other words, the characters identify both the central person and the opening location of the Book of Abraham.
That is not the kind of thing the CES Letter can explain by repeating “funerary text.”
The sequence continues in the same direction as the Book of Abraham itself: Kasdim, fruitful place, father’s house, Abraham, seeing, reckoning, going forth, and another residence or enclosure. That is the opening arc of Abraham’s story. He begins in the land of the Chaldeans, among the fathers, sees the corruption of that order, seeks greater priesthood, and departs.
And with the help of the Kirtland Egyptian Papers, we can decode even more from these 19 symbols by changing the degree code of the king.
Critics treat those papers as an embarrassment because they do not read like a modern Egyptian grammar. But that criticism assumes the wrong model. The Kirtland Egyptian Papers organize meaning by degrees, expansions, and layered associations. They do not behave like a flat dictionary. They behave like an attempt to unlock multiple meanings from compressed sacred signs.
Signs, exactly like the characters used in Facsimile 1.
That fits the Ptolemaic coding argument far better than the CES Letter’s caricature does.
If Ptolemaic Egyptian can carry surface readings, sound values, symbolic associations, embedded names, ritual meanings, and theological links, then the Kirtland Egyptian Papers are evidence that Joseph Smith and his associates understood this coded system and were working to share sacred scripture in a similar way.
The CES Letter depends on a shallow test:
Does the fragment produce the English Book of Abraham by ordinary surface translation?
The better test is deeper:
Do the characters beside Facsimile 1 preserve the names, locations, movement, and theological structure Joseph Smith revealed?
On that question, the evidence points in Joseph’s favor.
A critic can dismiss one parallel. A critic can dismiss one symbol. But the sequence is the problem. Abraham appears. Chaldea appears. The father’s house appears. Movement away from that world appears. Priesthood, temple ascent, and heavenly reckoning appear. These are not random decorations around an unrelated image. They are the opening logic of the Book of Abraham encoded beside the facsimile itself.
That is why the CES Letter’s confidence collapses.
It looked at the surface layer and declared the case closed. Joseph Smith saw more than the surface. The Kirtland Egyptian Papers suggest a layered approach. The Ptolemaic coding argument shows why that approach belongs in the world of the papyri, not outside it.
The surviving fragment is not a problem Joseph could not answer.
It is evidence the CES Letter did not know how to read.
If the characters beside Facsimile 1 unveil Abraham, Chaldea, the father’s house, departure, priesthood, and heavenly order in sequence, then the real Book of Abraham question is no longer why Joseph Smith failed a modern Egyptology test.
The real question is how he accessed the deeper code in the first place?