The world’s oldest book that was part of a private collection, and one of the first books to exist, was sold for more than £3 million (almost R60 million) at an auction in London on Tuesday.
the book, Crosby-Schoyen Codex, was previously owned by Martin Schoyen, a Norwegian businessman and collector of rare books. The book contains the earliest complete copies of two biblical texts: the book of Jonah and Peter’s first letter.
The auction was conducted by the auctioneer Christie’s with the opening bid at £1.7 million (about R33 million).
An anonymous online bidder was eventually successful and acquired the precious book for the full sum of £3,065,000 – including tax.
Egyptian farmers discovered the collection of manuscripts in the 1950s.
It was originally copied around the 4th century AD by a monk in what is now known as Egypt. This makes the collection at least 1,600 years old – and much older than more famous ancient works such as the Gutenberg Bible which dates from the 1450s.
The ancient biblical text was written in the Coptic alphabet on double-sided papyrus leaves. It is nowadays preserved between Plexiglas sheets and illustrates breakthroughs in written technology at a time when single-sided scrolls were more common.
Twelve additional select works from the Schoyen collection were auctioned alongside this literary treasure.
The entire collection consists of more than 20,000 pieces and spans 5,000 years of history: 3,500 BC to the present day.
Last year is the Codex Sassoon – A Hebrew Bible that is more than a thousand years old – sold by Sotheby’s in New York for $38.1 million (about R707 million). It was a new record.
This surpassed the $30.8 million (about R572 million) that computer billionaire Bill Gates paid in 1994 for Leonardo da Vinci’s manuscript Codex Leicester paid.
The most expensive historical document remains one of the first prints of the US constitution, which Sotheby’s sold in November 2021 for $43 million (about R798 million).
