IT could be the trailer for a new 'Indiana Jones' film, or the blurb for the latest Dan Brown book. "They were remnants of a lost-world religion. Buried for 1,500 years in the dusty sands of Egypt before being accidentally discovered, and brought to Nazi Germany.
"And then they were lost again, the priceless artefacts looted by the Russians and taken across the Iron Curtain. But now, they're back, and in Dublin."
However, the hero of this rather incredible tale is the collector Alfred Beatty rather than the actor Harrison Ford. And this is fact, not fiction.
Treasures
"It represents the fulfilment of Sir Alfred Chester Beatty's dream to have the Mani Books displayed alongside treasures from the ancient world such as the Biblical papyri and the Egyptian Love Poems," Michael Ryan, director of the Chester Beatty Library said yesterday.
The new exhibition in Dublin Castle opened yesterday and tells the story of the discovery of the lost books of Manichaean. It's a long tale, dating back to third-century Persia and focussing initially on the prophet Mani and his religion.
Manichaean, which combined the teachings of Jesus, Buddha and others, is believed to have almost replaced Christianity in some regions, and spread across much of the world. But Mani was executed and his followers widely persecuted before the religion died out around 1200AD.
Its sacred books, however, survived, buried in the Nile Valley for more than 1,500 years before they were discovered during the early part of the last century.
"At first it didn't look like much -- the 4,000 or so pages were a fibrous mass of papyrus that had been bonded together over the years to resemble a sod of turf," Charles Horton, the collection's curator, told the Irish Independent.
Because the pages are so fragile, they have never been put on public display before despite forming the largest Manichean collection in the world. The script is Coptic -- the language of Christian Egyptians -- but it has taken 30 years to translate just 25pc of the collection.
'Mani -- The Lost Religion of Light' exhibition is now open.
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