Zeta and the Coptic Library at Nag Hammadi

In 1945 a sealed jar containing thirteen leather bound Coptic codices was found near Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt. The books date from the fourth century and hold more than fifty separate works, most of them Coptic translations of texts composed in Greek, including the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip and a wide range of writings usually grouped under the label Gnostic. The find transformed what could be known about the varieties of early Christian thought in Egypt, because until then most of that material was known only from the hostile summaries of the writers who opposed it.

Zeta belongs to the part of the Coptic alphabet that carries the Greek layer of the language, and that layer is unusually thick in these codices. Their vocabulary is full of Greek terms for spiritual entities, for kinds of knowledge and for the structure of the cosmos, retained rather than translated, so the letters that write Greek sounds appear far more densely here than in a biblical text. Reading the codices is therefore an exercise in reading two languages at once, Egyptian grammar carrying Greek vocabulary, in a Greek derived script with Egyptian additions. The books also matter as physical objects, since their covers, bindings and quire structures survive, making them among the earliest well preserved codices anywhere and a principal source for how books were made in late antique Egypt.