We ask the candid reader carefully to examine these characters, and then look back again to page 261. Those [Joseph's transcript from the plates] are the characters Joseph Smith tells us were universally used in Central America 1,500 and 2,000 years ago—while the ruins, the engraved stones, the chiselled marble, tell us that these [Mr. Lamb's reproduction of Landau's Maya Alphabet] were the characters actually used in that locality, and at that time. Look at the two attentively—see if you can discover any likeness whatever between them. A woeful fatality, is it not? that there should not happen to be even one of Mr. Smith's characters that bears a family likeness, or the least particle of resemblance to the characters actually used by the ancient inhabitants of Central America![[39]]
Commenting again upon the characters of Joseph Smith's transcript, Mr. Lamb says:
The longer you look at them the more modern and familiar they will become until Professor Anthon's designation, a "hoax" will not seem at all surprising even to a candid Mormon. And if that word is not the proper one, this certainly must be acknowledged, that they are the most unfortunate specimen of ancient characters that have ever been exhibited; for they have a fearfully suspicious look, and it would take the clearest possible evidence to drive away that suspicion from any intelligent and unprejudiced mind.[[40]]
These are rather formidable conclusions to force upon us from a basis of comparison so narrow as that furnished by the three lines of Joseph Smith's transcript. This preserved scrap, published first in the "Prophet," New York, December 21st, 1844[[41]] of three lines, or even that of seven lines preserved with the Whitmer Manuscript, are evidently not all that were submitted to Professor Anthon[[42]] by Martin Harris. Professor Anthon in describing the characters submitted to him as a transcript from the plates, says:
This paper in question was, in fact, a singular scroll. It consisted of all kinds of singular characters disposed in columns, and had evidently been prepared by some person who had before him at the time a book containing various alphabets, Greek and Hebrew letters, crosses and flourishes; Roman letters inverted or placed sideways were arranged and placed in perpendicular columns, and the whole ended in a rude delineation of a circle, divided into various compartments, arched with various strange marks, and evidently copied after the Mexican calendar by Humboldt, but copied in such a way as not to betray the source whence it was derived.
Neither the three lined transcript,[[43]] nor the seven, meets this description of Anthon's though they may have constituted a part, and doubtless were a part of what was submitted to Professors Anthon and Mitchell. But neither of the two transcripts furnishes data for the conclusions of Mr. Lamb, since we have in them so few of the Nephite characters as a basis of comparison. But even from data so meagre as that furnished by these transcripts, it is possible to show that Mr. Lamb and others who have made like objection are too hasty in their conclusions. On a separate page, I give a photographic reproduction of the ancient Maya Alphabet as engraved by Dr. Augustus Le Plongeon, from the mural inscriptions of the Mayas, and the Egyptian Hieratic Alphabet according to Messrs. Champollion, Le Jeune and Bunsen. The whole page is a photograph reproduction of a page from the preface of Le Plongeon's Work, "Sacred Mysteries Among the Mayas and the Quiches," page xii.
Transcript of Ancient Egyptian characters from Rawlinson's History of Egypt
