The Three Steles of Seth was a central text of the Sethian sect of Samaritanism. While Sethians are generally described in modern literature as a Gnostic Sect, which would place their genesis in the late-1st or early-2nd-century AD, the sect was recorded by both early Christian, and Jewish historians from the period, as being a Samaritan sect that dated back to before Alexander's conquest of the Persian Empire circa 330 BC. It was nevertheless quite popular during the 2nd and 3rd-centuries AD, along side various Gnostic beliefs that likely had sprang from it. The sect was supposedly founded by a Samaritan named Dositheos, who found the Three Steles of Seth on a mountain top.