Muhammad Ali al-Samman
Egyptian farmer who found the Nag Hammadi codices in 1945
- Discovery
- December 1945
- Place
- Foot of the Jabal al-Tarif cliffs, near Nag Hammadi, Upper Egypt
- Found
- A sealed jar holding thirteen leather-bound papyrus codices
- Codices now in
- Coptic Museum, Cairo
- Story recorded by
- James M. Robinson, who interviewed him in the 1970s
The farmer who, digging for fertile soil in 1945, broke open a jar near Nag Hammadi and found thirteen Gnostic codices.
What is Muhammad Ali al-Samman known for?
Muhammad Ali al-Samman was a farmer from the village of al-Qasr in Upper Egypt. In December 1945, while he and his brothers were digging for sabakh, a nitrate-rich soil used as fertilizer, at the foot of the Jabal al-Tarif cliffs near Nag Hammadi, they uncovered a sealed clay jar.
According to the account he later gave the scholar James M. Robinson, he hesitated to open it for fear of a jinn, then broke it and found thirteen leather-bound papyrus books. Some pages were reportedly burned as kindling at home, and the codices passed through dealers before most were acquired by the Coptic Museum in Cairo. Robinson's version also links the family to a blood feud at the time.
The find, now called the Nag Hammadi library, contains Coptic translations of about fifty texts, many of them Gnostic and previously known only by name. Details of the discovery story rest largely on his recollections decades later, and some scholars have questioned parts of it.
He found the Nag Hammadi library, the source of the site's Gnostic texts on the Archons and Norea.
Mentioned on these pages
- Rabbit holeNag Hammadi library
Sources
- Roger Pearse, 'The Nag Hammadi discovery of manuscripts', tertullian.orgReference
- Wikipedia, 'Nag Hammadi library'Reference
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