Coptic Museum

Marcus Simaika founded the Coptic Museum in Cairo in 1908, on ground inside the walls of the Babylon fortress in what is now called Coptic Cairo, beside the Hanging Church. It exists because Coptic material kept falling between the categories the other collections used. Pharaonic Egypt had a museum. Islamic Egypt had a museum. The Christian centuries in between, with their own language, their own script and their own visual tradition, had nowhere at all, and objects from them were catalogued as appendices to one or the other.

The collection now runs to roughly fourteen thousand objects: textiles, sculpture and relief, icons, woodwork, metalwork, glass, ceramics, ivories and manuscripts. Taken together they show how pharaonic and Greco-Roman forms were reworked once the subject of the art changed, which is an argument the museum makes by arrangement rather than by wall label.

For this atlas the manuscripts are the reason. The most consequential of them are the Nag Hammadi codices, the Coptic books found in 1945 that put a library of Gnostic writing into scholars' hands for the first time in some fifteen centuries. The museum is recorded here as their custodian and not as a religious body: the Coptic Orthodox Church is its own subject elsewhere in the atlas, and what a museum holds and what a church believes are different kinds of fact.

Sources Coptic Museum, in Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East and North AfricaEncyclopedia.com (Gale Group) with The Nag Hammadi StoryJames M. Robinson

In December 1945 a farmer digging for fertiliser at the foot of the cliff of Jabal al-Tarif near Nag Hammadi broke open a sealed jar containing thirteen leather bound papyrus codices. What followed was not an excavation. The books were divided among the finders, some pages were burned for fuel, and the rest went onto the antiquities market and were scattered. One codex left Egypt entirely and was bought in 1952 for the Jung Institute in Zurich, which is why it is still called the Jung Codex; it was returned to Cairo afterwards. The remainder were bought or seized for this museum.

The work that followed was custodial rather than archaeological. Establishing which leaf belonged to which book took decades, because the codices had been broken up before any record was made of how they sat in the jar or of what was bound with what. A complete edition in English did not appear until 1977, thirty two years after the find, and the delay is a direct cost of the way the books came out of the ground.

One piece of evidence survived the mess intact, and it is the piece that dates everything. The cartonnage used to stiffen the leather covers turned out to contain dated Greek documents, which is how the burial can be placed in the second half of the fourth century. That date comes from the packing material rather than from the texts, and it remains the firmest thing anybody has about when the library went into the ground.