Magic papyri and rare icons .. A tour inside the Coptic Museum in ancient Egypt

In the center of the complex of archaeological religions, in the ancient Egyptian region of Cairo, there is a museum of the most important museums in Egypt, which is the Coptic Museum, which is located behind the walls of the famous Roman fortress of Babylon, which was established by Emperor Trajan "98 - 117 AD", and the walls and towers of this fort still exist and can Seeing it from the entrance to the museum, and the "seventh day" had a tour inside the halls of the museum, which we review through a video clip, accompanied by the archaeologist Samah Asham.



The Coptic Museum traces the history of Christianity in Egypt from its beginnings until the eighteenth century approximately, and it contains the largest and most collection of Egyptian Christian handicrafts in the world "about 16 thousand pieces".

The museum includes two wings, the exhibits are arranged in chronological order through two floors, and in addition to the museum's buildings there are gardens and courtyards and the area is surrounded by ancient Felicite churches whose origins date back to between the fifth and eighth centuries AD, including the Church of the Virgin Mary "hanging" and the Church of Abu Sarjah, a monastery and a church Mar Girgis, as well as the area includes the Jewish Temple "Bin Ezra" and the Mosque of Amr Ibn Al-Aas, to form the museum as a cultural, educational and recreational beacon within the complex of ancient religions.

The origins of the museum
The beginning was in the year 1898 AD, when the Arab Antiquities Preservation Committee recommended the establishment of a museum of Coptic antiquities, and all donations and collecting rare Coptic pieces were started with the blessing and effort of Pope Kyrollos V, and the idea began to allocate halls inside the Hanging Church to transfer Coptic holdings from the Bulaq Museum.

In 1902, Mark Semeika Pasha was able to obtain approval from Patriarch Kyrollos V to allocate a plot of endowment land to build a museum in ancient Egypt next to the hanging church.

In 1908 AD, Mark Semeika Pasha completed the collection and preparation of art pieces for display, as well as assembling the wooden ceilings of the ancient gems, which are in themselves a masterpiece.

In 1910 AD, the official opening of the museum was in the midst of a huge celebration that led to increased interest in the Coptic period by the community and collected a number of donations from all Egyptian personalities.

In 1931, the ownership of the museum was transferred from the ownership of the church to the Egyptian government, specifically to the Egyptian Ministry of Health, and as a result, a greater number of artifacts were transferred from the Egyptian Museum to the Coptic Museum.

In 1947 AD, during the reign of King Farouk I, a new wing was opened in the museum, which was designed by artist Ragheb Ayyad.

The area and the museum were restored and reopened to the public in 1984, and it was closed with its wings in order to develop the display to fit with modern museum display systems in the year 2000 AD, but it was opened again to the public after the development and re-preparation of the museum presentation scenario in 2006.

One of the highlights of the museum exhibits
4 Bibles
4 books on the life of Christ and his teachings, which are Bibles agreed upon by the Church (Matthew, Luke, John, Mark), written in Arabic and the Coptic language, and the Coptic language has dialects, which is the Sahidi dialect spoken by the residents of Upper Egypt, and a section on Lower Egypt that speaks It includes the inhabitants of the delta, and it is common in the Orthodox Church, where prayers are read.

Manuscripts Nag Hammadi
The Coptic Museum includes a special section for the Nag Hammadi manuscripts or the Nag Hammadi library, which is a collection of Gnostic texts discovered near Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt in 1945 A.D. These manuscripts consist of twelve papyri found by a farmer named Muhammad al-Samman buried in closed jars, and these manuscripts included On fifty-two essays, most of them Gnostic, but it also included three works belonging to the texts of Hermes and a partial translation of Plato's The Republic.

These manuscripts were written in the Coptic language, and the most prominent of its contents is a copy of the Gospel of Thomas, which is the only complete copy of this gospel. After its discovery, researchers adopted the parts of the sayings attributed to Jesus that were discovered in Oxyrhynchus in 1898 CE known as the First Oxyrhynchus Papyrus, and they compared the contents of the manuscripts with the quotes in Christian sources dating back to the early Christian ages, and they also linked that copy of the Gospel of Thomas with the original missing Greek version, dating back to the third and fourth centuries AD.


Priest's clothing, Coptic fabric, and icons
Among the notable sections of the Coptic Museum is the Coptic Textile Department, which includes a variety of priests' clothing in addition to carpets full of Coptic drawings, and in the adjacent section is a rare collection of Christian icons that tell different stories about Jesus and the early wilderness saints.

Papyri
They are papyri that talk about magic, and they have topics that resemble spells, and they contain mysterious texts, compared to other texts, which stipulate a contract, an answer or a receipt, but in magic papyrus writings that contain talismans are used, and this is usually magic texts from the era of the Pharaohs, Most of what we find on the magic papyrus is the bride, which is still there until now, where a bride is made for the envious person and is burned, and this indicates that the Egyptian thought continues until now.