Recovered from the Egyptian Desert, Read with Care

The 1945 discovery of the Nag Hammadi library in Egypt, a collection of Coptic-language texts including gospels, treatises and prayers associated with various Gnostic movements, dramatically expanded what scholars know about Gnostic religious practice and thought, including a Coptic version of a thanksgiving prayer closely related to the Hermetic Prayer of Thanksgiving catalogued elsewhere in this atlas, illustrating the considerable overlap and mutual influence between Gnostic, Hermetic and other late antique religious and philosophical currents rather than fully separate, hermetically sealed traditions.

Because the texts within this collection represent multiple distinct Gnostic schools of thought rather than a single unified tradition, and because scholarly interpretation of much of this material remains genuinely active and in places contested, this entry limits itself to describing the general category and its major textual discovery rather than presenting specific prayer content as representative of Gnosticism as a whole, given how much genuine internal variety that broad modern scholarly category actually contains. The Nag Hammadi texts were reportedly discovered by a local farmer digging near a cliff face, and their subsequent journey into the hands of scholars and antiquities dealers before formal academic study began was itself irregular enough that establishing a clear and complete provenance for the entire collection remains an ongoing matter of scholarly reconstruction.