The Book of Mormon, a work of scripture of the Latter Day Saint movement, describes itself as having a portion originally written in reformed Egyptian characters on plates of metal or "ore" by prophets living in the Western Hemisphere from perhaps as early as the 6th 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. Smith said that after he finished the translation, he returned the golden plates to the angel Moroni. Scholarly reference works on languages do not acknowledge the existence of either a "reformed Egyptian" language or "reformed Egyptian" script as it was described by Joseph Smith. No archaeological, linguistic, or other evidence of the use of Egyptian writing in the ancient Americas exists. Reformed Egyptian and the Book of Mormon 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, used the "learning of the Jews and the language of the Egyptians" () to write his record which constitutes the first two books of the Book of Mormon. The abridgment that the Book of Mormon says was prepared by Mormon and Moroni nearly a thousand years later in approximately 380 AD, containing most of the balance of the book, was written in "reformed Egyptian" because it took less space than Hebrew, which had also been altered after the people left Jerusalem. Mormon scholars note that other scripts were developed to write 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 handwritten form of hieroglyphics thousands of years old by the first millennium BC, or early Demotic, a simplified derivative of hieratic, which was used in northern Egypt fifty years before the time that the Book of Mormon states that prophet-patriarch Lehi left Jerusalem for the Americas (). The archaeological record includes occasional Judaean use, mostly of isolated hieratic symbols, dating from the 8th through early 6th centuries BC. Although accounts of the process differ, Smith is said to have translated