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.

Fuller account of this event (as retold in By His Own Hand Upon Papyrus Part 1 | Latter-Day Saints (Mormonism)):

One day in the early spring of 1966, a professor of Arabic Studies from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City entered one of the vault rooms of New York's huge Metropolitan Museum of Art, seeking supplementary material for a book he was writing. "I was in one of the dim rooms where everything was brought to me," Dr. Aziz S. Atiya would later recollect. "Something caught my eye, and I asked one of the assistants to take me behind the bars, into the storehouse of documents, so that I could look some more." Dr. Atiya soon located a file that contained an apparently forgotten collection of Egyptian Papyri -- eleven tattered pieces, to be exact -- which had been glued to stiff backing paper in the nineteenth-century in an effort to preserve them. The crude preservation efforts had been remarkably successful. But the vivid scene depicted on one fragment in particular was strikingly familiar to Professor Atiya, who, though not a Mormon himself, was well acquainted with the collection of various writings his LDS friends and associates revered as scripture.