One of the oldest books ever discovered and the world’s oldest book in the world was sold for more than £3 million at an auction in London on Tuesday. The book was part of a private collection. The earliest full copies of two Bible texts, the book of Jonah and Peter’s first epistle, can be found in the Crosby-Schoyen Codex, which was formerly owned by the Norwegian businessman and collector of rare books Martin Schoyen.
Enthusiastic online and in-person bidders began bidding for the text at Christie’s auction house, with the first price being £1.7 million. An anonymous phone bidder purchased it for £3,065,000 ($3,898,000) including taxes (world’s oldest book).
In the 1950s, Egyptian farmers found the codex. It is at least 1,600 years old, and much older than other well-known ancient writings like the Gutenberg Bible, which was copied by a monk in what is now Egypt in the fourth century AD.
The ancient biblical book, written in Coptic script on double-sided papyrus leaves that have been preserved between plexiglass plates, shows the advancements in writing technology during an era when single-sided scrolls were more prevalent. Alongside the literary gem, twelve other carefully chosen items from the Schoyen Collection were also put up for auction ( world’s oldest book).
According to its website, the collection as a whole consists of nearly 20,000 objects covering 5,000 years of history, from 3,500 BC to the present. The sale is by no means the biggest selling price for a rare text, although being outstanding. A Hebrew Bible that is almost a millennium old, the Codex Sassoon, set a new record last year when it sold for $38.1 million at Sotheby’s in New York.
world’s oldest book
That was more than the $30.8 million Bill Gates, the creator of Microsoft, spent for Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Leicester manuscript in 1994. One of the original printings of the US Constitution, which Sotheby’s sold for $43 million in November 2021, continues to be the most expensive historical document.
