Nothing about the Paris codex is more consequential and less documented than its findspot. The papyrus reached the Bibliotheque nationale through Jean d'Anastasy, a merchant who served as consul of Sweden and Norway in Alexandria and who supplied European libraries and museums with Egyptian antiquities across three decades of the nineteenth century. Several other major magical papyri, now in Leiden, London and Berlin, came from the same hand in the same period.
Because the group shares a period, a range of contents and a supplier, scholars have long treated it as a single find and called it the Theban Magical Library, on the further assumption that the papyri came from a tomb or a house at Thebes. The consequence of accepting that is substantial: it would mean the codices were a working collection belonging to one person or one establishment, and it would license reading them against each other as a single body of practice.
The evidence for it is a dealer's report. There was no excavation, no findspot record and no controlled context. The atlas records the Theban attribution as unresolved rather than debated, because scholars have not divided into camps holding rival answers; the work was begun and could not be concluded on the available evidence. What would settle it is a documentary one: the correspondence and sale records of the collectors who bought from Anastasy, read against the acquisition registers of the receiving institutions, which have never been examined together for this purpose.