Aziz S. Atiya and the Rediscovery of the Book of Abraham Papyri at the Metropolitan Museum (1966)

Aziz Suryal Atiya (1898–1988) was an Egyptian Coptic scholar—founder of the Institute of Coptic Studies in Cairo and, from 1959, founder of the Middle East Center at the University of Utah. He was not a Latter-day Saint, yet Providence used him to return a lost treasure to the Church. In 1966, while examining the archives of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, Professor Atiya recognized ten papyrus fragments that had once belonged to Joseph Smith—the ancient Egyptian funerary papyri associated with the Book of Abraham, lost to the Church for nearly a century after the Chicago Fire. Atiya alerted Church leaders, and the fragments were acquired and returned. That a Coptic Christian scholar, working in the archives of a great secular museum, should be the one to rediscover the papyri that produced the Book of Abraham is a remarkable providence—a quiet confirmation that the Lord watches over the records and evidences of the Restoration.