The exact course of events surrounding the books of Nag Hammadi is an extraordinary adventure that was not known until 30 years after their discovery, when Mohammed Ali Samman, credited with finding the books, agreed to give his account of what happened. His story was written down by scientists who were all too aware of the importance in finding out the circumstances of how the manuscripts came to see the light.  
     
   
     
  Mohammed Ali Samman had gone off in search of some sabakh, a natural fertiliser, in the mountains close to his village, when he accidentally unearthed a red earthenware jar approximately 1 meter high. At first, he was reluctant to break it, fearing that it might contain an evil sprit. The lure of money and his curiosity finally got the better of him. But instead of the gold that he had been hoping to find, he merely found a dozen books bound in brown leather cases, which he took back to his home in Al Quasr.  
     
  Unaware of his priceless find, he threw them onto the pile of straw used as fuel for their oven. His mother, Umm-Ahmad, even used bits of the books to keep the fire going.  
     
  According to Mohammed Ali Samman, he had been mixed up in some vendetta following the murder of his father. Bent on vengeance, a few weeks later, he and his brothers killed the culprit, Ahmed Ismail, who happened to be passing through the region.  
     
  Fearing reprisals from the police, he entrusted the treasure to the priest Al-Qummus Basiliyus Abd el Masih. Struck by the originality of the collection, he sent a sample of the manuscripts to the Egyptian historian Raghib, who having an inkling of their worth, had them sent to Cairo.  
   
   
   
 
The books were quickly sold on the black market and caught the attention of the Egyptian government, which consequently snapped them up, thereby preventing them from being dispersed and taken out of the country. They were taken to the Coptic Museum in Cairo, and another few years went by before scientists were made aware of their existence.
     
One of the codices, which today goes by the name of the Jung codex, slipped through the hands of the Egyptian authorities and was sold to private collectors in the United States. A Dutch Historian, Gilles Quispel, heard about these mysterious manuscripts and decided to buy them via the Jung Foundation in Zurich.    
     
After examining this single codex and noticing that it lacked a few pages, the historian set off for Egypt to fill in the missing pieces. He went to the Coptic Museum in the spring of 1955 to borrow the photos taken of the texts. That was when the actual value of the pages in his hands dawned on him - and that was only one of the 52 manuscripts discovered ten years earlier in Nag Hammadi!    
     
In his story, Mohammed Ali Samman admitted that some pages had been lost, burnt or thrown away. Even so, he had laid his hands on a fabulous treasure with its Coptic translations, dating back to the 2nd century AC, of religious and philosophical texts that were even older, initially written in Greek and a few fragments of which had been unearthed by archaeologists some 50 years earlier!      
The books were discovered to the north-west of Luxor, between Denderah and Panopolis. The corpus had been carefully placed in a tomb in the Pacomian cemetery at the foot of the Djebel el Tarif mountain.
       
     
 
   
 

In 1945, Mohammed Ali Samman, a local farmer, discovered a set of 13 books.

They were split into three parts, scattered, sold and then bought back. An investigation enabled them to be tracked down.
 
   
The first part of the manuscripts was entrusted to the priest Al-Qummus Basiliyus Abd el Masih. He sent it to the historian Raghib, and the manuscripts then became the property of the Coptic Museum in Cairo, where they were studied by the French Egyptologist, Jean Doresse. His examination brought to light the value of such a discovery, which explains the subsequent need to track down and reunite the rest of the collection.
   

The second part of the library ended up in the hands of an outlaw, Bahij Ali, in Samman's village. He sold it to Phocion Tano, an antique dealer in Cairo, following which the Egyptian government tried to buy it back. The dealer advised that he had sold it to an Italian collector, Miss Dattari, living in the Egyptian capital. When the manuscripts were declared part of the country's heritage in 1952 by the Ministry of Public Education, Dattari's collection became the property of the Coptic Museum in Cairo.

 
   
The last part of the manuscripts had also been sold on the black market and were bought by an antique dealer, Albert Eid. He refused to hand over codex 1 to the local authorities and smuggled it out of the country. Unable to sell it in the United Status, he placed it in a safe in Belgium. After his death, his wife took over with the illegal sale of the book.  
   
That was when it was noticed by Professor Gilles Quispel, who bought it via the Jung Foundation in Zurich, so that it could be offered as a birthday present to the psychoanalyst Carl-Gustav Jung.
 
   
Foot-note: Complete chronology available here (thank you in Albane).  
 
   
 
 
In 1952, 12½ codices were brought together at the Coptic Museum in Cairo and a large part of the 13th placed in the safe in Zurich. But according to the account given by Samman, some pages had been lost, burnt or thrown away.
Furthermore, no-one can be sure whether the library found in 1945 is complete or whether there might be an additional book somewhere out there.