Archaeology Magazine - June 1950 - 6

to heat tea. The remainder, at any event, passed, for
some piastres, into the hands of local merchants; the
loose pages were shown to a Coptic priest who tried
unsuccessfully to read them; then, through various
clandestine ways, they were brought to Cairo and
offered to dealers in antiquities.
A part of one manuscript with its binding was acquired by a private individual.
Another manuscript was, by
chance, offered
to Mr. Togo
Mina, Director
of the Coptic
Museum, whom
one can never
praise sufficiently
for having immediately perceived its value
and for buying
it without delay;
its contents are
The Gnostic library
remarkable. This
is a book on papyrus of more than 130 pages, complete with binding
of supple leather. The hand permits a very exact
dating at the beginning of the fourth century A.D. It
contains five treatises drawn up in Coptic (the last
period of the language of ancient Egypt, which, towards the second century A.D., gradually adopted the
Greek alphabet, supplemented by special letters).
These five works, previously unknown, are extremely valuable, for they came from various gnostic
sects, sects which had been observed by Saint Epiphanius in the Valley of the Nile during the fourth century
and designated by him Gnostics properly called
Ophites, Sethians or Barbelognostics. We knew little
that was certain about these religious sects, which in
their mixed doctrines of Greek philosophy and Christianity boasted of having the "perfect understanding"
or "gnosis"; and what we knew was limited almost
solely to the attacks and refutations, biased or inaccurate, of their Pagan and Christian adversaries:
Celsus and Plotinus, Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Epiphanius.
The document of the Coptic Museum constitutes in
itself the most important contribution that we have
ever had for the history of these oriental sects.
As for the fate of the other manuscripts, which
were also brought to Cairo, we find that three, the
finest, had been offered privately, for a very small
70

price, to a certain well informed scholar. He, instead
of buying them or bringing them to the attention of
a competent organization, allowed them to disappear
with cold unconcern. After this misfortune, the main
portion of the manuscripts disappeared completely
from sight. For at least two years the best informed
people refused to believe that these documents had
ever existed, or
considered them
irretrievably lost.
It would be
premature to tell
how we were
able to rediscover their trail
and how the
manuscripts were
secretly delivered to the Committee of the
Coptic Museum
in the winter of
1949; the manuscripts had been
of Chenoboskion.
saved by a private person who
agreed to give them to the Museum, alone qualified to ;
keep such documents. The negotiations entered on
for this sale, although well advanced, are not yet completed. Acknowledgement must be given to Mr. Togo
Mina, on the one hand, and, on the other, to the actual
owner of these documents, for having decided in
June, 1949, that, scientific interest being foremost, it
was possible to authorize the publication of the report
made by Mr. Mina and myself, appraising these papyri.
THE FIND IS CONSIDERED
as a whole, this
WHEN group of Coptic codices appears to be the most
impressive collection of books on papyrus that has ever
been seen, whether from the point of view of quantity, of antiquity, or of state of preservation. There
are, all told, thirteen documents. Eleven are complete
volumes with their supple leather bindings, more or
less decorated, still preserved. Two other volumes
are preserved only in part. The one volume acquired
in 1946 is, as we have mentioned, of the beginning of
the fourth century A.D.; the others belong to the third
century.
The state of preservation of the papyrus is particularly remarkable: of one set of 1,000 pages, fully 794
are complete. The number of codices, the care given
to their binding and in particular the ancient technique
ARCHAEOLOGY

Archaeology Magazine - June 1950

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Archaeology Magazine - June 1950