One of the world's oldest existing books, the Crosby-Schøyen Codex, was sold on Tuesday for £3.06 million (about €3.6 million) at an auction in London, according to Christie’s auction house.
This manuscript, written in Coptic on papyrus between the 3rd and 4th centuries, is unique. It is the oldest book of Christian liturgical texts, housing works like the First Epistle of Peter and the Book of Jonah, Christie’s emphasised.
It is also the oldest book in a private collection worldwide.
The text, consisting of 51 preserved leaves out of the original 68, sits protected between glass plates. Each page, scribed by a single hand, holds between 11 and 18 lines of two-column text.
The Codex was discovered among other papyri and parchments in Egypt in the early 1950s. The original collector, Swiss national Martin Bodmer, later sold it, and it passed through several hands in the ensuing decades.
The Crosby-Schøyen Codex serves as one of the few well-preserved artefacts demonstrating the evolution of books as a medium of text transmission – a practice that changed little until the advent of the printing press in the 15th Century, Christie’s noted.
The book's name honours US donor Margaret Reed Crosby, responsible for its acquisition by the University of Mississippi, and Norwegian collector Martin Schøyen, its most recent owner.
Despite the hefty price tag, it falls short of the record-breaking sales for other ancient manuscripts, such as the Sassoon Codex, the oldest Hebrew Bible, sold last year by Sotheby’s in New York for over $38.5 million.
