Manuscript Found in Accra

Начало книги

In December of 1945, two brothers looking for a place to rest found an urn full of papyruses in a cave in the region of Hamra Dom, in Upper Egypt. Instead of telling the local authorities—as the law demanded—they decided to sell them singly in the market for antiquities, thus avoiding attracting the government’s attention. The boys’ mother, fearing “negative energies,” burned several of the newly discovered papyruses.

The following year, for reasons history does not record, the brothers quarreled. Attributing this quarrel to those supposed “negative energies,” the mother handed over the manuscripts to a priest, who sold one of them to the Coptic Museum in Cairo. There, the papyruses were given the name they still bear to this day: manuscripts from Nag Hammadi (a reference to the town nearest to the caves where they were found). One of the museum’s experts, the religious historian Jean Doresse, realized the importance of the discovery and mentioned it for the first time in a publication dated 1948.

Читать дальше →