Nag Hammadi

History

The town of Nag Hammadi was found on the site of older villages Ansan () and al-Luaqi () in the 19th century and was named after its founder, Mahmoud Pasha Hammadi, a member of the Hammadi family in Sohag, Egypt. Mahmoud Pasha Hammadi was a major landholder in Sohag, and known for his strong opposition to the British rule in Egypt beginning in 1882. In the city of Nag Hammadi, there is the palace of Prince Youssef Kamal, a member of the royal family (the family of Muhammad Ali Pasha), which overlooks the Nile River and is now an archaeological site. Nag Hammadi is about west of ancient site of Chenoboskion (). The "Nag Hammadi library", an important collection of 2nd-century Gnostic texts, was found at Jabal al-Ṭārif near Nag Hammadi in 1945. The city was the site of the Nag Hammadi Massacre in January 2010, in which eight Coptic Christians were shot dead by three men. In total, nineteen Coptic Christians were attacked.