Town in Upper Egypt on the Nile.
In 1945 a collection of 13 codices containing 53 Gnostic texts (scriptures and commentaries) was found nearby at the site of an ancient settlement on the river's eastern bank. Written in the Coptic language, the texts were composed in the 2nd or 3rd century and copied in the 4th century. They include accounts of the life of Jesus and his sayings after his resurrection, predictions of the apocalypse , and theological treatises. As the only surviving documents written by Gnostics themselves, they constitute a major source of knowledge about Gnosticism .