In December 1945 a farmer named Muhammad Ali al-Samman was digging for soft earth to use as fertiliser at the foot of Jabal al-Tarif, near Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt, and struck a sealed jar. Inside were thirteen leather-bound papyrus codices. What happened next was not archaeology: the books were divided among the finders, some pages were used as fuel, and the rest went out onto the antiquities market and were scattered before any scholar saw them.
Codex II is the best preserved of the thirteen and the most important. It is a papyrus book of the mid-fourth century, written in Sahidic Coptic, still in its tooled leather cover with the flap that wrapped around it. It contains seven works: the Apocryphon of John, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, the Hypostasis of the Archons, On the Origin of the World, the Exegesis on the Soul, and the Book of Thomas the Contender.
Its date does not rest on handwriting. The leather covers of the Nag Hammadi books were stiffened with waste papyrus, and that waste turned out to include dated Greek documents, letters and receipts, which places the binding of the collection in the second half of the fourth century. It is one of the rare cases where a manuscript can be dated by the rubbish used to make it.