The Unesco Courier May 1971 [antikvár]

Where the Dead Sea Scrolls left off EARLY CHRISTIAN MANUSCRIPTS FROM THE SANDS OF THE NILE by James M. Robinson Sometime around 400 A. D., thirteen books were buried in Upper Egypt, to be dug up by pure chance a generation ago. This invaluable little library is now to be published in a facsimile edition by the United Arab Republic in co-operation with Unesco. Nothing is directly known about who buried the library. In fact, very little is known about who discovered it. But the generally accepted assumptions run somewhat as follows: 4 Jean Doresse, then a member of the Institute of Oriental Archaeological Studies (today a noted French historian of religion and specialist on Ethiopia], had initiative enough to track down the site of the find, some twenty years ago, when the library had only recently surfaced on the antiquities market of Cairo. After their purchase in 1951 by the Egyptian Government, the manuscripts were placed in the Coptic Museum in Cairo, and Jean Doresse was commissioned by the Museum to investigate the discovery. He equipped himself out for a minor desert safari, and after various adven- JAMES M. ROBINSON Is head of the Institute of Antiquity and Christianity at Claremont Graduate School in California (U.SA.). He served as secretary of the U.A.R.-Unesco /nternat/ona/ Committee for the Nag Hammadi Codices which met in Cairo last December. Under his direction, an /niernai/ona/ team of scholars is working on the English language publication of the Nag Hammadi codices with the help of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. tures, including being hospitalized from the bite of a wild dog, he reached what seems to have been the place of burial: a cemetery from Roman times near the modern town of Nag Hammadi (about two-thirds the way upstream from Cairo to Luxor), quite close to the small village of Hamra Dom. This cemetery was located in a strip of desert only some one hundred metres wide, running between the green vegetation nurtured by the Nile and a vertical cliff. At the foot of the cliff are masses of fallen stones, forming an irregular inclined plane which one can scramble up from the desert floor to the face of the cliff some ten metres above the flat sand below. At this accessible height on the face of the cliff artificial caves had been cut about the time of the Sixth Dynasty. Some were never completed, others were used for burials, and one contains the kind of relief sculpture and painting typical of Pharaonic tombs. But all had been looted In antiquity, so that by the fourth century A.D. they were merely a row of cool caves, ideal for hermit habitation. Evidence that they must have in fact functioned as the cells of monks is supplied in the form of rather crude red painting on the walls. Some caves have large crosses. One has a long text, listing by number and opening lines a series of Old Testament psalms, perhaps to remind the monk which psalm came next as he mumbled them in his devotions. One cave contained an ascription of praise to Zeus Sarapis, indicative of a non-Christian (or at least a not-just-Chris-tian) holy man. Monks inhabiting these caves would look out over the cemetery in the sand below, where their own burial might some day take place. There are instances of venerated persons being buried with a book, Just as possessions were more customarily buried with the owner in antiquity than today. One might also think, in analogy to the situation with the Dead Sea Scrolls, that the books may have been buried for safe keeping, when persecution descended upon the monks and extinction became imminent. As a matter of fact several references in the books themselves could have suggested such an idea, for several of the documents purport to be antediluvian revelations inscribed on stone or hid in a high mountain -jo