The site of Ṭura, ancient Trōē, is a situated 10km outside of Cairo, in a south-easterly direction. Since at least the Old Kingdom, the site functioned as a limestone quarry, and indeed, it retains that function to this day. Noted for its quality, it was with limestone from Trōē that many of the most important monuments were faced, including the Great Pyramid of Khufu. In the beginning of August 1941, the British military in Egypt decided to use several of the quarries fin the war effort, including for the storing of munitions. To facilitate this, a team of workers was sent to the site to make the necessary preparations by removing the large amount of debris that had piled up within the quarries over the centuries. In the course of work in quarry no. 35, a considerable collection of Greek papyri was retrieved and purportedly stolen by the workmen. For a discussion of the series of events that followed, see Gueraud 1946: 85-89. These papyri contained works of Origen and Didymus the Blind, spanning from the fifth through to the seventh centuries. The two pieces relevant for fourth century Christianity were reused in the bindings of some of these codices, rather than belonging to the codices themselves (see: objects). There were apparently no indications that the quarry had ever functioned as a hermitage, though it is noted that such traces could have been removed in the course of cleaning. The favoured explanation, rather, was that a nearby monastery had perhaps hidden the works in the wake of the Arab conquest, though there were apparently no indications of the papyri having been concealed (Gueraud 1946: 86).