In the upper Egyptian region of Nag Hammadi close to Alecandria, two brothers named Muhammad and Khalifah Ali where gathering nitrates to fertilize their crops. While loading their camel’s saddlebags the two brothers saw a jar at the base of a fallen boulder. Muhammad admitted that at first he was afraid to break open the jar as he was superstitious of it containing sealed inside a jinn. He decided that it also held the possibility of holding gold, so his want of the treasure got the better of his fear and he smashed it open with his mattock. After the jar was opened, the vacuum was released and small golden particles were sent flying into the air, probably the effects of bits of decomposed papyrus and the vacuum of the jar being sealed for over a thousand years. Out fell a book, which Muhammad wrapped in his tunic and returned home with.
How It Began Around Alexandria,Egypt
Seven months earlier the son of the local and disliked sheriff named Ahmad was believed to have murdered the two brothers' father as he was the night watchman in the fields guarding the irrigation equipment from thieves. After another local had seen Ahmad sleeping by the side of the road, he alerted the brothers who in turn returned home to get the rest of their seven brothers. At the mother’s consent the seven brothers took their mattocks and hacked the limbs off of Ahmad and finally cut out his heart with each of the brothers eating a part of it.
The investigation of the death of Ahmad stalemated after although at the time many witnessed the brutal murder, none remembered seeing anything as the hatred of the sheriff was know throughout the region.
After a few months the books were found when the police who while investigating the murder of Ahmad searched the Ali home finding them and noticing that they were Christian, more then likely Gnostic, by the Coptic script. After which Muhammad took the books to a Coptic priest asking him to hold them since a priest would more then likely not be searched. The priest’s wife’s brother, a traveling teacher in the Coptic Church’s parochial schools, noticed one of the books and told of the potential value of the books, as recalled from 'The Nag Hammadi Library', by James M. Robinson G.E.
Finding The Nag Hammadi Find And The Coptic Script
The brother-in-law took a book to Cairo to have it looked at by a man named George Sobhi, a Coptic physician interested in the Coptic language. He called in the book to the authorities at the Department of Antiquities. The department took the book paying 250 pounds for it on October 4th, 1946, almost a year after it was found.
During that ten month span the mother of the two brothers that had found them thought the books to be a source of bad luck, using the pages of one of them to light the oven with over that time. After the one book had been discovered in Cairo the rest were sot after. Within a very short time the world would start analyzing them for their content, most noticably the Gospel of Thomas.
