Just outside Alexandria, on a rise above Lake Mareotis, there was once a community that did something the ancient world almost never recorded: it let women study.

We know about them at all because of one man. In the first century, the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria wrote a short treatise, On the Contemplative Life, describing a community he called the Therapeutae: a name that means either "healers" or "servants of God," depending on whom you ask. They had walked away from property and the noise of the city to spend their lives reading, interpreting scripture, and praying. Each member lived alone in a plain dwelling with a single room set aside for study. Six days a week they read and wrote in solitude. On the seventh, they came together.

And here is the detail that should have made them famous: the community included women; not as servants or silent attendants, but as members. Philo describes them studying the same texts, keeping the same disciplines, and joining the same sacred vigils as the men. At the community’s great festival, the men and the women each formed a choir, sang in answer to one another, and then merged into a single chorus. Women who had chosen a life of the mind over marriage sat among the scholars as scholars.

For the ancient Mediterranean, that is close to astonishing. Women in this world were rarely taught to read deeply, almost never recorded as thinkers, and seldom granted a place in the spiritual life of a community on anything like equal terms. By the lake at Mareotis, for one generation that Philo happened to witness, they were.

Then they vanished.

Philo wrote about them, and after Philo, silence. No later Jewish source picks the story back up. The community simply drops out of the record; no account of where they went, when they scattered, or why.

What happened next is the part that belongs in this series. Three centuries later, the Christian historian Eusebius read Philo’s description and decided the Therapeutae had not been Jewish contemplatives at all. They were, he announced, early Christians: monks converted by Mark the Evangelist, the very first monastery of the church. It was a tidy story, and it was almost certainly wrong: Philo was writing before there was a church to convert anyone. But Eusebius’s version stuck for over a thousand years. A Jewish community that had made room for women scholars was quietly rewritten into something it never was. And the women, the most remarkable thing about it, faded out of the retelling entirely.

This is how erasure usually works. Not with a bonfire. With a more convenient version of the story, repeated until the original is forgotten.

I write fiction, but the history underneath it is real. The Apocrypha Trilogy is built on exactly this kind of gap. Knowledge that existed, mattered, and was buried, sometimes to protect it and more often to control who was allowed to remember it. The Therapeutae are the sort of thread that started the whole series for me: a community of scholars in the shadow of the greatest library the ancient world ever built, women among them as equals, and then nothing. Just a space where a record should be.

The library down the road from them is gone too, and most of what those scholars read and argued over and copied by hand is gone with it. But the gap itself tells you something. That two thousand years ago there were women holding scripture and study in their hands, and that the people who wrote history afterward did not think they were worth keeping. We remember them now only because one philosopher bothered to write it down. It is worth asking how many communities like theirs never had a Philo at all.

The Therapeutae, the lost library, and the buried texts behind them all run through The Apocrypha Trilogy. The first book, The Alexandria Cypher, is available now — and the prequel novella is free if you want to start there.

Related: Junia — The Apostle the Church Turned into a Man.

For fans of Kate Mosse, Brad Meltzer, and Deborah Harkness, The Apocrypha Trilogy delivers a heart-pounding journey of mystery, history, and suspense.