History

History sometimes arranges its evidence with suspicious timing. In 1945, a farmer near Nag Hammadi in Egypt broke open a sealed jar of buried Gnostic scriptures. Within about two years, in the cliffs above the Dead Sea, Bedouin shepherds of the Ta’amireh tribe found the first cave of what became the Dead Sea Scrolls, another buried library, also in jars, also hidden from a hostile century. Two libraries, interred by two different communities, surfacing almost together after nearly two millennia underground. They document different movements, and reading them side by side transformed one of scholarship’s oldest questions, which is where Gnosticism actually came from. The answer the jars suggest is closer to home than anyone expected. ...

In the spring of 367, the archbishop of Alexandria sent an Easter letter to the churches of Egypt, ordering believers to reject what he called illegitimate and secret books. His name was Athanasius, his letter contained the first known list of the New Testament exactly as we have it, and somewhere up the Nile, most likely at a monastery whose monks treasured the forbidden volumes, somebody responded by sealing a library in a jar instead of feeding it to a fire. ...

Artificial intelligence feels like the newest thing in the world. The dream behind it might be one of the oldest stories we tell. Nearly three thousand years ago, Homer described the workshop of Hephaestus, the smith god. Assisting him were servants he had forged out of gold in the shape of young women, and the poet is oddly specific about them. They had understanding in their hearts, they could speak, and they steadied their limping maker as he walked. The first androids in Western literature appear in its first great poem, and they appear as helpers. ...