The find happened in the course of ordinary farm work. Men from a village near Nag Hammadi were digging at the base of the Jabal al-Tarif for sabakh, the nitrogen-rich earth Egyptian farmers dig from ancient sites and spread on their fields, when they struck a large sealed jar. Broken open, it held books: papyrus codices in leather covers, some with the flaps and thongs still attached.
The fuller version of the story is dramatic and should be handled with care. In it the finder is named as Muhammad Ali al-Samman, who hesitated to open the jar for fear of a spirit, then hoped for gold; who was shortly afterwards involved in a blood feud in which his father's killer was hacked apart; and whose mother burned some of the papyrus as kindling in the family oven. That account comes from interviews conducted by James Robinson in the 1970s, some three decades after the events. The earlier account gathered by Jean Doresse in the late 1940s contains none of it. The books were certainly found, and pages were certainly lost between discovery and sale, but the circumstantial detail is testimony collected long afterwards rather than established fact, and careful writers now attribute it rather than assert it.
What is not in doubt is the dispersal. The codices passed through a local schoolteacher, dealers in Cairo and the antiquities market, were partly confiscated by the Egyptian state, and were partly smuggled abroad. Most of the material reached the Coptic Museum in Cairo, where it remains.