Deseret

In his account of the Jaredite journey to New World, Moroni relates how “they did also carry with them deseret, which by interpretation, is a honey-bee; and thus they did carry with them swarms of bees” (Ether 2:3). Some early readers claimed that there was no evidence to support any association between this unique Book of Mormon name and the bee.¹ Subsequent evidence, however, points in the other direction.

The Red Crown of Egypt and Deseret

In the ancient world, the bee was associated with the king of Egypt. Scenes from rituals performed at the temples of Edfu and Dendera portray the king presenting honey to Egyptian deities.² This royal association with the honeybee goes back to a very early period. According to Manal B. Hammad, “the bee was frequently used in the ancient Egyptian texts throughout ancient Egyptian history down to the Roman period, as it was strictly associated with the royal ideology designating the king as the sovereign of Lower Egypt.”³

The crown of Lower Egypt, known as the Red Crown, has a distinctive appearance. Toby Wilkinson explains, “The curly protuberance at the front of the crown has been linked with the bee (connected with kingship from at least the middle of the First Dynasty, through the title nswt-bity, ‘he of the sedge and bee’), and also with the goddess Neith, an important Egyptian deity.”⁴ The earliest representation of the crown appears on the sherd of a redware vessel found in the lower Nile delta from the Naqada I period in Pre-Dynastic times (4000–3500 BC).⁵

Hugh Nibley was the first Latter-day Saint scholar to draw attention to the name of the Red Crown,⁶ which Egyptologist Sir Alan Gardiner noted was dšrt (pronounced Deshret).⁷ The name dšrt was even directly substituted for the word bee in some Egyptian texts, perhaps for sacred reasons.⁸ Not only does this Egyptian term bear a striking phonetic similarity with deseret from the Book of Mormon, but both words are associated with bees.

Deseret among the Jaredites

The attestation of dšrt/deseret in ancient Egyptian is notable but raises the question of how the Jaredites—who are believed to have departed from ancient Mesopotamia (Omni 1:22; Mosiah 28:17; Ether 1:33)—would have learned the name. While this question cannot be answered definitively, there is good evidence for trade and cultural interactions between Egypt and Mesopotamia during the earlier period when the Jaredites may have left the region.⁹ It is not implausible that a linguistic term such as dšrt would have been part of the cultural exchange. Moroni’s need to use the phrase “which by interpretation is” (Ether 2:3) may even suggest that deseret was a term foreign to Mesopotamia that required clarification.¹⁰

Conclusion

The Book of Mormon’s use of the name deseret in association with the honeybee was once considered to be without cultural or linguistic support. Today, however, we know that an ancient Egyptian term very similar to deseret was indeed associated with the honeybee. It is also significant that a connection between the Jaredites and this Egyptian word makes the best sense during the early period of Mesopotamia (when the Jaredites most likely dwelled there). Notably, the evidence supporting this connection was unavailable to Joseph Smith when he translated the Book of Mormon in 1829.¹¹

Book of Mormon Central, “Where Does the Word “Deseret” Come From? (Ether 2:3),” KnoWhy 236 (November 22, 2016).

Hugh Nibley, “The Deseret Connection,” in Abraham in Egypt, 2nd ed. (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book, 2000), 608–647.

Hugh Nibley, Lehi in the Desert, The World of the Jaredites, There Were Jaredites (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book, 1988), 189–193, 319–322.

Omni 1:22Mosiah 28:17Ether 1:33Ether 2:3

Omni 1:22

Mosiah 28:17

Ether 1:33

Ether 2:3