Reformed Egyptian

The Book of Mormon, a work of scripture of the Latter Day Saint movement, describes itself as having originally been written in reformed Egyptian characters on plates of metal or "ore" by prophets living in the Western Hemisphere from perhaps as early as the 4th century BC until as late as the 5th century AD. Joseph Smith, the movement's founder, published the Book of Mormon in 1830 as a translation of these golden plates. Scholarly reference works on languages do not, however, acknowledge the existence of either a "reformed Egyptian" language or "reformed Egyptian" script as it has been described in Mormon belief. No archaeological, linguistic, or other evidence of the use of Egyptian writing in ancient America has been discovered.

The Book of Mormon uses the term "reformed Egyptian" in only one verse, , which says that "the characters which are called among us the reformed Egyptian, [were] handed down and altered by us, according to our manner of speech" and that "none other people knoweth our language." The book also says that its first author, Nephi, was taught both the "learning of the Jews and the language of the Egyptians" (), that the book was written in "reformed Egyptian" because that language took less space and was easier to engrave on gold plates than Hebrew, and that there was also an evolution of the Hebrew after the people left Jerusalem.

Mormon scholars note that other languages evolved from Egyptian through the centuries and have hypothesized that the term "reformed Egyptian" refers to a form of Egyptian writing similar to other modified Egyptian scripts such as hieratic, a priestly shorthand for hieroglyphics thousands of years old by the first millennium B.C., or early Demotic, a derivative of hieratic, perhaps used in northern Egypt fifty years before the time that the Book of Mormon prophet-patriarch Lehi is said to have left Jerusalem for the Americas.

Although accounts of the process differ, Smith is said to have translated the reformed Egyptian characters engraved on gold plates into English through various means, including the use of a seer stone or the Urim and Thummim, or both. Smith said when he had finished the translation, he returned the plates to the angel Moroni, and therefore they are unavailable for study.

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