Meanwhile, a single codex had been sold in Cairo to a Belgian antiques dealer. After an attempt was made to sell the codex in both New York City and Paris, it was acquired by the Carl Gustav Jung Institute in Zurich in 1951, through the mediation of Gilles Quispel. It was intended as a birthday present for Jung; for this reason, this codex is typically known as the Jung Codex, being Codex I in the collection.[7] Jung's death in 1961 resulted in a quarrel over the ownership of the Jung Codex; the pages were not given to the Coptic Museum in Cairo until 1975, after a first edition of the text had been published. The papyri were finally brought together in Cairo: of the 1945 find, eleven complete books and fragments of two others, 'amounting to well over 1000 written pages', are preserved there.[8]
Luxor.3 CODEX
The so-called "Codex XIII" is not a codex, but rather the text of Trimorphic Protennoia, written on "eight leaves removed from a thirteenth book in late antiquity and tucked inside the front cover of the sixth." (Robinson, NHLE, p. 10) Only a few lines from the beginning of Origin of the World are discernible on the bottom of the eighth leaf.
Manuscript fragments from three leaves of a papyrus codex Bible lectionary; written and decorated in Egypt.Texts: Fragments from a Biblical lectionary containing the verses Psalms 28:8, 50:7-9, 97:1-2, 107:2-5, Ephesians 5:17-20 and Titus 2:11 (?). All verses are fragmentary.Edited by Crum.Written area ? x ca. 125 mm. Divisions: Title in red, dividers (sometimes string of horizontal S-signs), and reddened enlarged initial setting off paragraphs (1 instance in fragment 1r; an obelus left of divider?); title on the recto of fragment 3 preceded to the left by a triple dash-and-two-diple divider.Script: Upright; apostrophes. 10 lines = ca. 96 mmSuperlineation: Connective? Punctuation: ?Tremas.Collation: No remains of signatures, quire ornaments, monograms, headlines or catchwords.Decoration: red (chemically altered).
The Papyrus Graecus Holmiensis (Stockholm Greek Papyrus), a complete 15-leaf (39-page) papyrus codex written in Greek around 300 CE, contains 154 recipes for the manufacture of dyes and colors used in creating artificial stones. It is one of the earliest complete treatises on any technical or chemical subject, one of the earliest surviving complete papyrus codices on a secular subject, and a key record of the transmission of practical, technical information from the Hellenistic world to Byzantium.
The manuscript appears to have been written by the same scribe as a similar codex, Leyden papyrus X, preserved in the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden, which also contains different recipes for the manufacture of materials.
It is an unfortunate fact that the codex was found not by a team of archaeologists, who would have been able to record its location and context, but by looters who came across it in a cave in Mexico and then sold it to a Mexican collector called Josué Sáenz. This is a factor that made it all the easier to argue that the manuscript might have been a fake, since its original context could not be verified. Luckily, however, Professor Coe and his colleagues have been able to show via a range of analytical methods that, despite the circumstances of its discovery, we have many reasons to believe that the codex is real.
More damage was done when, upon reaching his home in al-Qasr, Muhammad Ali threw the codices unceremoniously into a courtyard reserved for the animals. A while later, the mother of Muhammad Ali took some of the dry papyrus leaves of the codices and used them along with straw to light a fire in the clay oven used by the family. Robinson has surmised that the papyrus leaves may have come from what we now call Nag Hammadi Codex XII, since that codex is very fragmentary, with only a few leaves remaining. On that day gnosis and wisdom of one sort or another went up in smoke and ash, lost forever.
The Berlin Gnostic Codex and Other Texts A few decades before the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library, at the end of the nineteenth century, a papyrus codex related in its contents to the Nag Hammadi codices came to light in Egypt. The circumstances surrounding the discovery remain obscure, but in January 1896 a dealer in manuscripts in Cairo offered the codex for sale to a German scholar, Carl Reinhardt. The dealer was from Akhmim, north of Nag Hammadi in central Egypt, and the codex may have come from there as well. The dealer claimed the codex had been discovered with feathers covering it in a recessed place in a wall, but that story may be a tall tale. Carl Schmidt, the editor of the codex, thought that it may have come from a cemetery or somewhere else near Akhmim. In any case, Reinhardt bought the codex in Cairo and brought it to Berlin, where it was housed in the Ägyptisches Museum. Today it is referred to as Codex Berolinensis Gnosticus 8502, or Berlin Gnostic Codex 8502. (5)
In order to convert the leather-bound codices from softbound to hardbound books, scrap papyrus from letters and documents was sometimes pasted inside the covers of the Nag Hammadi codices, and then a blank piece of papyrus could be glued over the unsightly used material. This scrap papyrus, called cartonnage, from the Nag Hammadi library has been carefully examined by scholars and published in a volume dedicated to ancient wastepaper: Nag Hammadi Codices: Greek and Coptic Papyri from the Cartormage of the Covers, edited by John W. B. Barns, Gerald M. Browne, and John C. Shelton. The cartonnage contains names of people, places, and dates, and these bits of information provide clues to the time and place of the construction of the codices. In the cartonnage there are dates in the middle of the fourth century and just before, and names suggesting monks and locations around Pbow and Seneset (Chenoboskia). Cartonnage from the cover of Nag Hammadi Codex VII mentions a monk named Sansnos who supervised the cattle of a monastery. (17) He would have had easy access to leather for codex covers. In other words, the evidence of the cartonnage may provide points of contact between the production of the Nag Hammadi codices and the Pachomian monastic movement.
Roberts made the above statement at a lecture to the British Academy in 1977. In 1987, he reaffirmed that this was still his position in his publication, The Birth of the Codex. There is nothing on record that suggests Roberts ever changed his position that P4, P64, and P67 are parts of the same Gospel codex.
The codex also contains examples of the Aztec calendar system, which you can see along the blue bar. Each of the symbols represents a date, and consists of a small image combined with several small circles.
An ancient Egyptian codex written in Coptic and dating back 1,300 years had been deciphered for the first time, revealing that the 20-page book made of parchment contains a series of spells and invocations, including spells to counter evil possession. The codex reflects a fusion of religions, as some invocations call upon Jesus, while others refer to divine figures from the Sethian religion, considered heretical in the 7 th century AD when the text was created.
According to a report in Live Science , the codex is currently being held in the Museum of Ancient Cultures at Macquarie University in Sydney. However, having been purchased from an antiquities dealer in the 1980s, its origins are unfortunately unknown. The dialect used in the ancient text may suggest an origin in Upper Egypt, perhaps around the ancient city of Hermopolis.
"It is a complete 20-page parchment codex, containing the handbook of a ritual practitioner," write Malcolm Choat and Iain Gardner, who are professors in Australia at Macquarie University and the University of Sydney, respectively, in their book, "A Coptic Handbook of Ritual Power" (Brepols, 2014).
Choat and Gardner have said that the codex appears to have been written before all Sethian invocations were purged from magical texts. It therefore reflects a rare insight into this ancient, but little-known religion.
Kept at Bologna University Library, the codex is a pre-Columbian well-preserved, ritual screenfold manuscript, decorated with many illustrations and with the front cover, marked with four golden fan designs, specially created for that gift in Rome or Bologna, around 1665.
There are very few pre-Columbian manuscripts in the world; the Codex Cospi is one of them. Researchers will use cutting-edge non-invasive techniques to figure out the composition of the bright colors with which the codex was embellished between the end of the 15th century and the beginning of the 16th.
Two different masters worked on the front and back sides of the codex. Its front side contains three sections of pictures linked with dates, used for divination. The back side depicts eleven rituals. Read more
The Synaxeis, which was broken up by the Egyptian dealers, includes Codex B in the Chester Beatty Library (thirteen mounted leaves; facsimile edition, Giversen, 1986c, pp. 101-26) and P. Berol. 15995 in Berlin (156 mounted leaves and the preserved book block, containing at most 120 unmounted leaves). Although several scholars have studied this badly preserved codex (Böhlig, Carsten Colpe, and Robinson and his colleagues), only some of the chapter titles and notes on the codicological structure have been published (Mirecki, 1988; idem, forthcoming; King).
The two collections of the Kephalaia, despite their similarities in title and other details, are characterized by significant differences. The largest portion of one of them is preserved in Berlin (P. Berol. 15996; more than 472 pages, partially published with German translation; Polotsky [pp. 1-102] and Böhlig [pp. 103-292]; Böhlig, 1966; idem, 1989a, pp. 638ff.); after 1945 some unpublished leaves turned up in Warsaw, and pages 311-30, missing from the Berlin fragment, were bought in Egypt by Adolf Grohmann and are now in the Nationalbibliothek, Vienna (K 11010a-h; cf. Gardner, 1988, I, pp. 53-55). The second codex is in the Chester Beatty Library (Codex C, 354pp.; facsimile edition, Giversen, 1986b); it contains running heads with the title The Kephalaia of the Wisdom of My Lord Mani. 2ff7e9595c
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