Ransacking the Pyramids
In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, there have been reports of looting in Egypt. People desperate for money have been ransacking archaeological artifacts from museums and selling them over the Internet. Even worse, tombs in Egypt are being dug up as people delve for items that they can sell for money to feed their families.
There are also reports of widespread looting in Syria, where ISIS is doing a lot of the looting in order to fund their terrorist efforts.
Apart from wanting to curtail the efforts of ISIS, why should anyone in the Western world care about this?
The New Testament, as we know it today, wasn't written by a single author and given to us in its entirety. It is, instead, a collection of writings penned by several authors that were selected from a larger collection of writings. That is, the books of the New Testament were curated. For example, the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were included, while those of Thomas, Philip and Mary Magdelene were excluded. The Apocalypse of John (which we call "Revelations") was included, while the Apocalypse of Peter was not.
The early Christian church decided which of the writings were canonical (included in the New Testament) and which were non-canonical. Several of the non-canonical writings that were not included are classified as the so-called "gnostic gospels". While many of the gnostic writings cover the teachings of Jesus, and share a lot of common ground with the canonical writings, they were excluded because they were ideologically at odds with the teachings of the "orthodox" Christian church. People who possessed them were rejected as heretics, and an extensive effort was made to eliminate them.
We've known for a long time now that these writings existed, because the people who sought to destroy all the copies of them in the first few centuries after the death of Jesus mentioned them in their own writings. The contents of these non-canonical scriptures, however, is something we've only been able to guess at, for the most part, based on what those who tried to destroy them have said about them.
In 1945, a couple of Egyptian farmers were digging for fertilizer near the city of Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt. They accidentally uncovered a large glass container that contained several scrolls of ancient documents. Historians later established that these codexes contained several copies of non-canonical Christian scriptures.
Historians believe that these were buried near Nag Hammadi during the 4th century A.D. The reason seems easy to deduce: someone fled with copies of the gnostic documents as the orthodox church was destroying them, and buried them in the hopes that someone would uncover them several years later.
The 20th century was the century of archaeology. Arguably, one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of that century was that of the Nag Hammadi documents. There was also the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls about ten years later, which offer the same historical significance and potential insight to those who study the old Hebrew scriptures as the Nag Hammadi documents offer to those studying the canonical New Testament scriptures.
The implication is clear: major world religions are not static entities. While it might be convenient to think that we understand everything about the stories of Moses and Jesus, it's often difficult to glean spiritual understanding of the teachings of the prophets and the stories in scriptures without an understanding of the historical context. There's a lot we don't know about the time periods when the prophets lived. Egypt and Syria, among other countries, are two regions in which Judaism and Christianity established themselves.
In essence, the artifacts that the looters are digging up and distributing via online sales to people all over the world is almost certainly destroying the pieces of a puzzle which, when studied and analyzed, might give us answers to questions about us, major religions, and ancient civilizations that we haven't even thought to ask yet. Much of this destruction is probably irreversible.
The discoverers of the Nag Hammadi documents didn't know what they had uncovered. A handful of pages were burned by one of their mothers back at home as kindling. Those that weren't burned were sold off for a pittance individually, which left archaeologists scrambling for the next 20 years to track down and recover all of them. It's not hard to imagine that the current looters in Egypt are digging up artifacts of similar historical and religious significance and selling them to collectors on eBay, setting up future archaeologists with the Herculean task of finding and piecing Humpty back together again.
Many of the looters admit to feeling bad about this. They concede that they are robbing from their own cultural history to feed themselves and their families, but given the economic circumstances in these countries, feel that they have little choice in the matter. That some of these looters are using the proceeds from these sales to fund terrorist activities only compounds how atrocious this is.
In the 2010 animated film Despicable Me, an aspiring supervillain named Vector ("I commit crimes with both direction and magnitude!") steals a pyramid from Egypt and replaces it with an inflatable look-a-like. In the film, the world is horrified to see this crime reported on the news, and is in awe of the new villain with the audacity to steal a significant piece of ancient history.
Later that year after the film came out, the uprising in Egypt began. In its wake and the accompanying economic downturn, the region has seen the proliferation of hoards of "mini-Vectors" who steal pieces of this same history for financial gain. A contemporary riddle of the Sphinx might well be: why do we, as a species, care so little that this is occurring, and why aren't we doing more to stop it?
There are also reports of widespread looting in Syria, where ISIS is doing a lot of the looting in order to fund their terrorist efforts.
Apart from wanting to curtail the efforts of ISIS, why should anyone in the Western world care about this?
The New Testament, as we know it today, wasn't written by a single author and given to us in its entirety. It is, instead, a collection of writings penned by several authors that were selected from a larger collection of writings. That is, the books of the New Testament were curated. For example, the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were included, while those of Thomas, Philip and Mary Magdelene were excluded. The Apocalypse of John (which we call "Revelations") was included, while the Apocalypse of Peter was not.
The early Christian church decided which of the writings were canonical (included in the New Testament) and which were non-canonical. Several of the non-canonical writings that were not included are classified as the so-called "gnostic gospels". While many of the gnostic writings cover the teachings of Jesus, and share a lot of common ground with the canonical writings, they were excluded because they were ideologically at odds with the teachings of the "orthodox" Christian church. People who possessed them were rejected as heretics, and an extensive effort was made to eliminate them.
We've known for a long time now that these writings existed, because the people who sought to destroy all the copies of them in the first few centuries after the death of Jesus mentioned them in their own writings. The contents of these non-canonical scriptures, however, is something we've only been able to guess at, for the most part, based on what those who tried to destroy them have said about them.
In 1945, a couple of Egyptian farmers were digging for fertilizer near the city of Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt. They accidentally uncovered a large glass container that contained several scrolls of ancient documents. Historians later established that these codexes contained several copies of non-canonical Christian scriptures.
Historians believe that these were buried near Nag Hammadi during the 4th century A.D. The reason seems easy to deduce: someone fled with copies of the gnostic documents as the orthodox church was destroying them, and buried them in the hopes that someone would uncover them several years later.
The 20th century was the century of archaeology. Arguably, one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of that century was that of the Nag Hammadi documents. There was also the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls about ten years later, which offer the same historical significance and potential insight to those who study the old Hebrew scriptures as the Nag Hammadi documents offer to those studying the canonical New Testament scriptures.
The implication is clear: major world religions are not static entities. While it might be convenient to think that we understand everything about the stories of Moses and Jesus, it's often difficult to glean spiritual understanding of the teachings of the prophets and the stories in scriptures without an understanding of the historical context. There's a lot we don't know about the time periods when the prophets lived. Egypt and Syria, among other countries, are two regions in which Judaism and Christianity established themselves.
In essence, the artifacts that the looters are digging up and distributing via online sales to people all over the world is almost certainly destroying the pieces of a puzzle which, when studied and analyzed, might give us answers to questions about us, major religions, and ancient civilizations that we haven't even thought to ask yet. Much of this destruction is probably irreversible.
The discoverers of the Nag Hammadi documents didn't know what they had uncovered. A handful of pages were burned by one of their mothers back at home as kindling. Those that weren't burned were sold off for a pittance individually, which left archaeologists scrambling for the next 20 years to track down and recover all of them. It's not hard to imagine that the current looters in Egypt are digging up artifacts of similar historical and religious significance and selling them to collectors on eBay, setting up future archaeologists with the Herculean task of finding and piecing Humpty back together again.
Many of the looters admit to feeling bad about this. They concede that they are robbing from their own cultural history to feed themselves and their families, but given the economic circumstances in these countries, feel that they have little choice in the matter. That some of these looters are using the proceeds from these sales to fund terrorist activities only compounds how atrocious this is.
In the 2010 animated film Despicable Me, an aspiring supervillain named Vector ("I commit crimes with both direction and magnitude!") steals a pyramid from Egypt and replaces it with an inflatable look-a-like. In the film, the world is horrified to see this crime reported on the news, and is in awe of the new villain with the audacity to steal a significant piece of ancient history.
Later that year after the film came out, the uprising in Egypt began. In its wake and the accompanying economic downturn, the region has seen the proliferation of hoards of "mini-Vectors" who steal pieces of this same history for financial gain. A contemporary riddle of the Sphinx might well be: why do we, as a species, care so little that this is occurring, and why aren't we doing more to stop it?