(London) A collection of Christian liturgical texts written in Coptic presented by Christie’s as “one of the oldest books in existence” was sold at auction for 3.06 million pounds sterling ($5.4 million) on Tuesday in London under the name of Crosby-Schøyen Codexannounced the auction house.
This manuscript written in Coptic on papyrus between the middle of the 3e century and the 4e century, according to experts, is “the oldest book of Christian liturgical texts”, including in particular the First Epistle of Peter and the Book of Jonah, underlines Christie’s.
It is also the oldest book belonging to a private collection in the world.
Composed of 51 sheets (out of the 68 constituting the original book) preserved today between plexiglass plates, each page containing between 11 and 18 lines written in two columns, this text was written by a single scribe.
It was discovered with other papyri and parchments in the early 1950s in Egypt and acquired by a Swiss collector, Martin Bodmer, before changing hands several times over the following decades.
This manuscript is also “one of the rare well-preserved witnesses” to the appearance of the book as a means of transmitting texts, using a technique which evolved little until the invention of printing in the 15e century, adds the auction house.
It owes its name to an American donor Margaret Reed Crosby, who allowed the University of Mississippi to acquire it, and to the Norwegian collector Martin Schøyen, its last owner.
It was sold with other pieces from the Schøyen collection.
This sale is far from the records reached by certain other ancient manuscripts, such as the Sassoon Codex, the oldest Hebrew Bible, sold last year for more than $38 million by Sotheby’s in New York.
Or the 44 million dollars paid by Microsoft founder Bill Gates in 1994 to acquire the Codex Leicester by Leonardo da Vinci.