5 Things You Didn’t Know Are in the Gordon College Archives 

Roman coins, Cuneiform tablets, pamphlets from the Reformation, pieces of Egyptian Sarcophagi, 1990s computers, a Torah scroll…It sounds like a list of museum highlights, but did you know all of these––and so much more!––are nestled away on the second floor of Gordon College’s Jenks library? The Gordon College Archives is full of magical artifacts hidden among old course catalogues, personal letters from A. J. Gordon to his wife and books that are hundreds of years old. Here are just a few of the wonderful items you can find there.

1. Egyptian Sarcophagi Pieces from Elizabeth Elliot Gren (1070-664 B.C.) 

In a large white box on a shelf in the Archives are three Egyptian Sarcophagi pieces: two from the same sarcophagus, and another, separate piece. One is painted with bright feathers, which might be associated with the god Horus, who was often portrayed with a falcon head. Another (right) shows a weighing of the heart ceremony, where the dead appear before Osiris, the god of the dead, and his wife, Isis.  

Despite being almost 3,000 years old, these fragments are intact, and the images are clear because the sarcophagi were made with layers of linen and plaster before being painted over. Brought to America in the 1800s by William C. Prime, an art historian on the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, they were eventually donated to Gordon by Elizabeth Elliot Gren, the evangelist, author and wife of missionary Jim Elliot.  

How she came to have the sarcophagi pieces is a mystery, although there is speculation that they came from her brother, who was a collector of Egyptian artifacts. Since they came to Gordon College in the 1980s, they have anchored the Egyptian Archeological Collection, along with several other ancient fragments.  

2. An Original Martin Luther Pamphlet (1543 A.D.) 

Martin Luther, the German theologian who in 1517 posted 95 theses on a church door in Wittenburg and began the Protestant Reformation, spent most of his life afterwards writing and disseminating his thoughts on Christianity, particularly through his vernacular translation of the Bible into German and his pamphlets.  

This pamphlet (left) is an original printed work on the Psalms written by Martin Luther and printed in 1543. What’s especially interesting about this copy is the marginalia; the original reader of the pamphlet, in very old German script, marked up the margins of the book and even crossed out some of the words!  

This demonstrates the contemporary interaction with text and the accessibility of the printed pamphlets that helped the Reformation catch fire. This pamphlet is especially interesting for students studying the Reformation or biblical history.  

3. John Eliot’s Bible (1663 A.D.) 

A Cambridge-educated, Puritan-inspired pastor and linguist, John Eliot came from England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1631 and quickly became interested in missions to Native Americans. The first Bible printed in the Western Hemisphere once the first printing press came to American soil, John Eliot’s Bible is a translation of the Bible into a phonetic rendering of the Wampanoag language. Only about 33 copies of this Bible still survive, and for many years it was forgotten because Wampanoag was a dead language.  

As recently as the early 2000s, Harvard’s copy of the Eliot Bible was used by Jamie Little Doe Baird, an MIT graduate and member of the Mashpee tribe of the Wampanoag nation, to revive the language. She worked with linguists to recover her spoken language from the Eliot Bible and other written documents in the old Wampanoag language.  

4. Shakespeare’s Second Folio (1632 A.D.) 

Published not long after his death, Shakespeare’s folios are complete collections of his plays. The first was compiled and printed in 1623;not long afterwards this Second Folio (right) was published in 1632, with over 1,700 edits and improvements from the First Folio. There are only about 200 copies of this book still in existence.  

Shakespeare’s Second Folio, as well as the Martin Luther Pamphlet and John Eliot’s Bible, are housed in Gordon’s Vining Rare Book Collection. Collected between 1912–1920, they were donated to the Gordon College Archives by Edward Pason Vining’s son-in-law after Vining’s death. They are one of the many Archives Collections that students who love the humanities and literature find useful for research and learning. 

5. DECpc 333 Portable (c. 1991 A.D.) 

MIT graduate and former Gordon Board of Trustees member Ken Olsen compiled an extensive collection of digital artifacts, including old memory cores, circuit boards and computers. The DECpc 333 Portable (right) was manufactured by Olsen’s company, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC).  

By 1988 DEC was the second-largest computer manufacturing company, second only to IBM. After serving as CEO of the company for 35 years, Olsen stepped down and donated his archival collection of computers and technology to Gordon College, impressed with the College‘s faith-based educational mission. 

Visit the Gordon College Archives 

Classes at Gordon College are often enriched by items from the Archives; history, linguistics and English students interact with books or artifacts from the archives based on time period or subject. Students are also invited to visit the Archives to complete their own research. Visit Gordon College to learn more about our academic programs and to see the Archives for yourself. 

Emily Jones ’25, English language and literature