Abstract
On a dusty hot day in 1886, a group of French archaeologists excavating Cemetery A at al-Hawawis in the desert necropolis of Akhmim opened the long-sealed grave of a Christian monk. Within the tomb, the excavators discovered a book, an ancient codex, now known as the Codex Panopolitanus. This chapter follows Birger Pearson's lead in considering seriously the Egyptian context ancient and late antique for the shaping of these Greekbased thanatologies. Seen with an attentiveness to Egyptian afterlife conceptions, it is little surprise that Greek-language apocalyptic texts with, apparently, a ritual component, found their final home in late ancient Egypt. There, a culture persisted which saw the cultural and religious value in creating and burying of the dead. The Berlin Codex, which contains the Gospel of Mary , the Apocryphon of John , the Sophia of Jesus Christ , and the Acts of Peter , appeared on the antiquities market in 1896. Keywords: al-Hawawis; Berlin Codex; books of the dead; Codex Panopolitanus; Egyptian context; French archaeologists; Greek-language; Greekbased thanatologies
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