The "Katumin" Notebooks

In a small 1835 notebook with Joseph Smith's signature on the cover, we find the following:


A parallel notebook has the name of F. G. Williams on the cover. It has a two page spread which is combined into a composite image below. The left hand page bears the title "A Translation of the next page," with the words "in part" scribbled next to it in graphite. (The graphite isn't visible in these crappy microfilm images I'm posting.) The right-hand page contains various Egyptian characters. Notice that the character sets above and below the canopic jar on the far right are very similar to the character sets aligned with the English translation in the Joseph Smith notebook, above.


This is one of the only places in Joseph Smith's entire corpus where we have ancient symbols and an English translation juxtaposed in explicit translation relationship to each other. The characters, of course, don't actually say what Smith claimed they said.

Joseph Smith seems to have understood the "Katumin" passage in the notebooks to have been an "epitaph" of the mummies he purchased from Michael Chandler. It was to this passage that William I. Appleby referred in his Autobiography:

A Genealogy of the Mummies, and Epitaphs on their deaths &c &c, are also distinctly. represented on the Papyrus. Which is called the “Book of Abraham”
The Male mummy was one of the Ancient Pharaoh's of Egypt, and a Priest, as he is embalmed with his tongue extended, representing a speaker: The females were his wife and two daughters, as a part of the writing has been translated, and informs us, who they were, also whose writings it is, and when those mummies were embalmed, which is nearly four thousand years ago.

The name "On-i-tos" given to the Pharaoh in the notebooks is the same that Lucy Smith assigned to the male mummy during the visit of Charlotte Haven in 1843:

On one side were standing half a dozen mummies, to whom she introduced us, King Onitus and his royal household, -- one she did not know.

Lucy was not entirely consistent in naming the mummies, and gave other names on other occasions. The Mormons were quite consistent in identifying them as a Pharaoh and his family, however, and in this case at least Lucy does seem to confirm the identification made in the Katumin notebooks.