The Pharaoh’s Own Conquers the Vatican
The armored car with a police escort, lights blazing, sirens hooting, and whooping, sped noisily along the back roads of the city. Fortunately for the residents there were several direct routes that skirted the city center and led away from the Bodmer Library in the Cologny enclave of Geneva, Switzerland. The same roads stayed well away from the Lake Geneva waterfront. Disruption in that area was thus kept to a minimum.
Once over the Rhône River, the cavalcade drove on at moderate speed to an exit that took them along the Route de Pré-Bois from which they passed into a high security section of the Geneva airport where they lurched to a sudden halt.
The Swiss have experience in such things, so the police escort and private security agents equipped with automatic rifles that jumped out and surrounded the armored car raised few eyebrows. It was all second nature to a city used to the transport of large sums of cash, gold, or objets de valeur. Still, some employees at the airport must have been surprised to see the container being manhandled up the steps into the passenger cabin of the small chartered plane. Whatever it was, it was obviously too precious to be trusted to the baggage compartment.
Inside the aircraft, enough seats had been removed so that a space was created that allowed the guards complete access and visibility.1 They had to have a clear view of the container at all times. Once they were satisfied, they settled back and the plane taxied out onto the runway. It was airborne within minutes.
Regardless of their confidence in handling such things, based on past experience, the authorities at the airport knew that anything could happen at any time, which is why they gave a collective sigh of relief when the flight finally took off and quickly passed out of Swiss air space into France as it winged its way onward to the Eternal City. Inside the plane the guards stayed on alert for the entire hour and a half required to get to Rome.
Their arrival at Fiumicino-Leonardo da Vinci Airport was an entirely different matter than the operation in Geneva. First of all, one whole part of the chartered cargo section of the airport had to be sealed off to the public until well after the event. On landing, the package was transferred under the eyes of a new set of armed guards to a waiting van. A motorcade formed up consisting of this van sandwiched between two Italian police cars and four motorcycle police outriders. Once clear of the airport the fast-moving, blinking, hooting entourage was tracked overhead by a helicopter. The chopper was necessary to guard the airspace above the convoy as it traveled through the outskirts of Rome into the western approaches of the city. Any James Bond-type maneuvers or interventions would be ruled out.
They sped along on the Via Aurelia to where it joins the Viale Vaticano then onto the Via Pio X that took them into the parking lot of the Vatican Library, now cleared of all vehicles. Pulling to a stop at the front entrance, the container with its precious cargo was carried directly to a vault room for inspection by Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, librarian and archivist. As he stepped forward, we can only imagine his feelings, as with the greatest of trepidations, he snapped open the sealed latches on the container to reveal the contents.
What was in this container that had been treated with such extraordinary deference? What had demanded an entourage expensive and worthy enough to satisfy any head of state of any major world power? It was nothing more than two-dozen sheaves of papyrus paper.
It was a small homely bundle that is now considered to be the most precious item ever owned by the Vatican Library. The auspicious date of this codex’s arrival was November 22, 2006, the day when the Bodmer Papyrus XIV–XV, containing the Gospels of Luke and John, was actually delivered to the Vatican.
At that point, according to the Catholic News Service, the papyrus paper sheaves were subjected to the ultimate obeisance, as Cardinal Tauran invited the pope to “come in person to the Library to meditate, if I may say so, in front of that which can be considered a true relic . . .”2
Dating from between 175 and 225 A.D. this codex includes the oldest extant copy of portions of the Gospels as well as the oldest transcription of the Lord’s Prayer. It had been bought and donated by Frank Hanna, the American entrepreneur, merchant banker, and philanthropist. In appreciation, the codex was renamed the Hanna Papyrus. After receiving the package, the cardinal took a few special pages directly to Pope Benedict’s private apartment. Everyone involved now believed that this bundle of papyrus paper had come full circle and the text contained on it had been brought back to the church, back to its proper home. The Vatican accession was a small part of a large cache of papyrus documents found over a period of time in the Dishna region near Nag Hammadi.
The first part of the Nag Hammadi discovery appeared in 1945 when a local Egyptian farmer, Muhammed Ali al-Samman, found twelve leather-bound codices in a large earthenware vessel. They constituted fifty-two classic and religious texts written in Coptic; about 1000 pages of papyrus paper in all. The place concerned, Nag Hammadi, is a town on the west bank of the Nile at the north end of the large bend in the river above Luxor (see insert, Map D). The codices were eventually collected by the Egyptian Department of Antiquities and deposited in the Coptic Museum in Cairo.
In a way, that part of the Nag Hammadi story illustrates how discoveries of ancient papyrus documents should turn out, since the finds were kept together and deposited in a responsible way. Research into these volumes can then be focused on questions like: what was the exact date they were written, or where was their place of origin, or what events or people were involved with their production? This is in contrast to what happened after that, when more volumes were discovered in a place called Dishna. Professor Marvin Meyer of Chapman University in California provided an excellent summary of these subsequent discoveries.
Spurred on by the hope of uncovering more codices, possibly even the remains of a library or scriptorium, archaeological excavations were begun and continue to this day. The diggers had cause for great expectation since it happens that the town of Nag Hammadi was in an area of Egypt that had a strong Christian presence in the fourth century. The region is today rife with the remains of the earliest monasteries, the very first monasteries ever built. When I first heard that from someone whose life has been devoted to the study of the early history of Christianity, I found it difficult to believe. “Didn’t monasticism begin in Europe?” I asked, incredulous. I soon learned that it started in Egypt, and according to tradition it began with Saint Anthony, the first Christian monk.
Born in Egypt into a wealthy family in 21 A.D., he received the call at age thirty-four, gave away his possessions, and made his abode in a small cave in the Eastern Desert, deep in the Red Sea Mountains southeast of Cairo. He attracted thousands of followers and disciples, but they often found solitary life difficult. It was another Egyptian, Abba Pachomius, who developed the idea of having Egyptian monks live and worship together under the same roof. (His name “Abba” evolved into the term “abbot,” the traditional head of a monastery.) Like Anthony, he was an Egyptian convert to early Christianity. Pachomius established his monastery in 318 A.D. on the eastern bank of the Nile not far from Thebes (the Greek name for Luxor). His second was founded in 330 A.D. at Pbau (now the modern town of Faw Quibli, Map 7), a place where he later spent much of his time.
Along with the Pachomian monastery at Pbau, a monastic church was built; the basilica was completed in 459 A.D., by which time it was the center of a thriving Christian community. Caves in the region today contain ancient Egyptian signs and symbols, as well as Coptic Christian graffiti added later perhaps by the monks of Pbau.
In 1952, not long after the Nag Hammadi discovery, another papyrus cache was found in Dishna, a town twenty miles east of Nag Hammadi on the opposite bank of Nile not far from Luxor. The documents in this cache were thought to have originated in a scriptorium at Pbau and were all that were left of the library of the Pachomian order. They contained Coptic letters of Pachomius and early Greek copies of the Gospels mixed in with Gnostic texts and works belonging to the Corpus Hermeticum and even a partial translation of Plato’s Republic.
James Robinson, who served as professor emeritus of religion at Claremont University in California, suggested that these codices might have been buried after the church condemned the use of noncanonical books in 367 A.D. “When the Pachomian monks heard the stern words of admonition of the holy archbishop, they may have thought of the books of spiritual wisdom in their possession, books that could be considered heretical, and they determined to dispose of them. Yet they simply could not bring themselves to destroy them, so they gathered them and hid them safely away, to be uncovered on another day . . . buried by the boulder at . . . Jabal al-Tarif.”
This collection was later known as the Dishna Papyri, and unlike the Nag Hammadi codices that ended up in the Coptic Museum, the documents in the Dishna collection were passed from surreptitious hand to surreptitious hand with odd lots being sold off whole or in part. The famous wealthy collector, Martin Bodmer in Switzerland, bought sixteen of the codices and three of the rolls, all of which joined the 150,000 works in eighty languages in his collection in Geneva. Other volumes went to the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin and further material wound up in Barcelona and at the Universities of Mississippi and Cologne. In later years, as we saw above, part of the Bodmer cache was even presented to the Vatican.
And what of papyrus paper? In this respect, the monasteries and their libraries were ideally located. They had landed right in the heartland of papyrus paper production.
Although the bulk of paper used by the monks may have come from the delta north of Memphis, the swamps all along the river throughout the Nile valley could easily have provided for their local needs. Once the papyrus paper was laid out and pages copied by the monks in the scriptorium, they would be folded, sewn into quires, and then collected into finished codices ready for leather covers. This process in the Egyptian monasteries probably closely resembled that of Cassiodorus one hundred years later in his Italian enclave at the Vivarium in Squillace; and like the production there, the main component available for the books would be papyrus sheets, still the most easily available and a most reliable source of paper in the world.
It’s true that parchment was available; Professor Meyer suggests that the cattle from the monastery probably provided the leather for the covers and thongs used to protect the volumes. They could just as well have provided parchment and vellum in small quantity, but cost and trouble involved in such an effort held the monks back. Perhaps in years to come those in authority would demand parchment be used, especially for important codices. We know that in the Bodmer collection in Switzerland, of the thirty-five books eventually collected from Dishna and mostly produced in these same Egyptian monasteries, only three were written on parchment.3 For practical purposes all the Nag Hammadi codices and the major share of the Bodmer books and scrolls from that region show that the monks used papyrus paper extensively.
The limitation of these early codices was explained by Sever Voicu, of the Vatican Library.4 He tells us that Bodmer Papyrus XIV-XV (the gift delivered with such fanfare and now called the Hanna Papyrus) originally consisted of thirty-six sheets that had been folded and placed one on top of the other to make a codex of seventy-two leaves or a total of 144 pages. This shows that the codex form used by the monks, although it provided much more room than the classical papyrus scrolls (one codex would equal seven full scrolls), had a tendency to split along the fold, especially if the number of sheets exceeded fifty. Thus, he concluded that a codex of this kind could only contain a little more than two Gospels. It’s true that the new acquisition is the oldest example of the text of the Gospels of Luke and John being bound together, but why, Voicu asks, did it not contain all four Gospels? The answer he informs us is that the other two Gospels, one each by Matthew and Mark, wouldn’t fit.
He concluded that, since all the lists of the Gospels begin with that of Matthew, one must presume that another volume was also made and is now lost, which contained the Gospels of Matthew and Mark. He further noted that, “Translation of the papyrus showed that the versions of the Gospels of Luke and John found in our Bibles today reproduce almost exactly the words of those Gospels as transcribed just over a century after they were first written: God’s words to us have come down to us intact.”
Yet again we have the word of the divine transcribed on papyrus the list of which includes Moses, Muhammad, Christ, Osiris, Thoth, and many of the Roman deities and gods of the Greek pantheon.
During the period in the 1940s and fifties when the Nag Hammadi papyri and the Dishna papers were being uncovered, another find captured the attention of the world: the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Initially found by a Bedouin shepherd, Muhammed edh-Dhib, in several large earthenware jars in the region of Khirbet Qumran on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, they were written in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Nabataean-Aramaic between 408 B.C. and 318 A.D. More scrolls were discovered following this initial discovery. In all, there were eleven caves that from 1946 to 1956 gave up a total of 930 different texts, mostly on parchment, though some (131) were on papyrus.5 They were often so fragmented that, to date, thousands of small pieces still exist that are the subject of continued research.
During the lectures I gave promoting my earlier work on papyrus, I was often asked about the Dead Sea Scrolls. They remain probably the most famous modern finds known to the general public. People wanted to know why so many were written on parchment? “After all, wasn’t this, as you tell us, the Age of Papyrus?”
I would explain that in most other Judean desert sites papyrus paper makes up the majority of finds6 and the paper used was most likely obtained as a trade item from Egypt. The scarcity of papyrus paper at the Qumran site remained a mystery.
The most intriguing idea connected with Qumran seems to me to be the archival library concept recently outlined by a team of scholars who are specialists in the Dead Sea Scrolls, Professors Sidnie Crawford and Cecilia Wassen, who in 2016 presented a case that the settlement contained a library where the Essenes studied, read, and copied manuscripts. The Essenes would then have used the series of nearby caves as residential archives, 7 much like modern museums and libraries use ancillary buildings to house their overflow in places where researchers can still have access to the volumes. A case in point is the Library of Congress that maintains three large facilities in Washington, DC, and one in Virginia.
The team bolstered their theory with several observations, the most important being that the bulk of the scroll collection, that is, 580 of the total 930 documents, was in Cave Four, a cave that has anchor holes cut into the walls presumably to hold dowels that in turn would support shelves on which the scrolls could be kept. They considered the Dead Sea Scrolls were simply the remains of a library and archival complex of the Essenes. Their propensity for reading and communal organizational structure was well known, and this provided the team with a compelling analog to the library of Alexandria and its scholarly community.
Crawford thought that the main library was in the settlement at Qumran where several rooms were available, especially those with niches in the walls along with a high bench that may have been a support for shelving. She concluded that the caves served as residential library archives where Essene scholars lived and worked on the collections. In the caves she saw an effort to preserve, store, and keep everything. Here there were multiple copies and multiple editions of major works, scriptural, nonsectarian and sectarian, some of which were two centuries old in the last decades of the community’s existence. Included in the archives were tiny scribal exercises of interest to nobody except possibly the trainee scribe himself. In the caves there were also extremely esoteric works, which would have been of interest only to a few highly trained master scribes. There are even Greek texts, only of interest to an inhabitant with specific training in that language, such as the person living in Cave Seven.
Thus, the Qumran collection has all the hallmarks of being an archive with a master library in the main settlement. This would also allow the cave residents to live and work on the collection whose purpose was “to function as the archive of the wider movement to which the Qumran community belonged, as well as the library for the residents at Qumran, and it was collected and tended to by the professional elite scholar scribes attached to the community, some of whom resided in the caves for that purpose.” And there is no reason why later documents could not have been added to the cave archives even after the Romans destroyed the main settlement.
The Essenes were a religious community of Jewish priests who flourished from the second century B.C. to the first century A.D. They had escaped Jerusalem because they held theological differences with mainstream Judaism concerning diet, oaths, celibacy, and the role of sacrifices. During excavations of the ruins, archaeologists found remnants of their primarily male community, including baths, cemeteries, a scriptorium with inkwells, and a ceramics workshop. The pottery made there was chemically similar to that found housing the Dead Sea Scrolls, suggesting a positive link between the pottery in the caves and this Jewish monastery.8
The Essenes perhaps cultivated their isolation; it must have worked in their favor to remain secluded. If so, they may have discouraged outside contact with any caravan trade that could have delivered papyrus paper if desired. This meant that they purposely put themselves in the same position as Chinese communities in Asia, or Europeans north of the Alps, or the auxiliary Roman soldiers in the fort at Vindolanda.
Once removed from the source of papyrus paper, no matter where you were in the ancient world, the official community and general public would have to rely on local products, like parchment or vellum made from local animals, or bamboo slips, or tablets of wood veneer made from local plants.
In the case of Qumran, there seems to have been an extensive freshwater system including a dam in the upper section of Wadi Qumran to secure water that was brought in quantity to the settlement by an aqueduct. As I mentioned before, the possibility is there that they may even have cultivated papyrus. The plant is known to have grown in the Mideast in swamps, wadis, and riverbanks, and it has grown wild in the Jordan valley for the past 5,000 years.9 Since dried papyrus stems could supply fuel for their baths and pottery kilns, as well as provide for the production of a small amount of paper, it could have easily served a purpose in the Qumran settlement. The Essenes could have used it in limited quantities. After all, even though the majority of the texts were on parchment, 15 percent were written on papyrus paper, and who knows how many more vanished during the intervening 1600 years.