Marcus Simaika founded the Coptic Museum in Cairo in 1908, on ground inside the walls of the Babylon fortress in what is now called Coptic Cairo, beside the Hanging Church. It exists because Coptic material kept falling between the categories the other collections used. Pharaonic Egypt had a museum. Islamic Egypt had a museum. The Christian centuries in between, with their own language, their own script and their own visual tradition, had nowhere at all, and objects from them were catalogued as appendices to one or the other.
The collection now runs to roughly fourteen thousand objects: textiles, sculpture and relief, icons, woodwork, metalwork, glass, ceramics, ivories and manuscripts. Taken together they show how pharaonic and Greco-Roman forms were reworked once the subject of the art changed, which is an argument the museum makes by arrangement rather than by wall label.
For this atlas the manuscripts are the reason. The most consequential of them are the Nag Hammadi codices, the Coptic books found in 1945 that put a library of Gnostic writing into scholars' hands for the first time in some fifteen centuries. The museum is recorded here as their custodian and not as a religious body: the Coptic Orthodox Church is its own subject elsewhere in the atlas, and what a museum holds and what a church believes are different kinds of fact.
Sources Coptic Museum, in Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East and North AfricaEncyclopedia.com (Gale Group) with The Nag Hammadi StoryJames M. Robinson