The codex was the historical ancestor of the modern book. Instead of being composed of sheets of paper, it used sheets of vellum, papyrus, or other materials. The term codex is often used for ancient manuscript books, with handwritten contents. A codex, much like the modern book, is bound by stacking the pages and securing one set of edges by a variety of methods over the centuries, yet in a form analogous to modern bookbinding. Modern books are divided into paperback and those bound with stiff boards, called hardbacks. Elaborate historical bindings are called treasure bindings. At least in the Western world, the main alternative to the paged codex format for a long document was the continuous scroll, which was the dominant form of document in the ancient world. Some codices are continuously folded like a concertina, in particular the Maya codices and Aztec codices, which are actually long sheets of paper or animal skin folded into pages. In Japan, concertina-style codices called orihon developed during the Heian period (794–1185) were made of paper.
In textual studies, a palimpsest is a manuscript page, either from a scroll or a book, from which the text has been scraped or washed off in preparation for reuse in the form of another document. Parchment was made of lamb, calf, or kid skin and was expensive and not readily available, so, in the interest of economy, a page was often re-used by scraping off the previous writing. In colloquial usage, the term palimpsest is also used in architecture, archaeology and geomorphology to denote an object made or worked upon for one purpose and later reused for another; for example, a monumental brass the reverse blank side of which has been re-engraved.
An illuminated manuscript is a formally prepared document where the text is decorated with flourishes such as borders and miniature illustrations. Illuminated manuscripts include liturgical books such as psalters, courtly literature, and documents such as proclamations.
The Book of the Dead is an ancient Egyptian funerary text generally written on papyrus and used from the beginning of the New Kingdom to around 50 BC. The original Egyptian name for the text, transliterated r(ꜣ)w n(y)w prt m hrw(w), is translated as Book of Coming Forth by Day or Book of Emerging Forth into the Light. "Book" is the closest term to describe the loose collection of texts consisting of a number of magic spells intended to assist a dead person's journey through the Duat, or underworld, and into the afterlife and written by many priests over a period of about 1,000 years. In 1842, the Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius introduced for these texts the German name Todtenbuch, translated to English as 'Book of the Dead'.
The Chester Beatty Library, now known as the Chester Beatty, is a museum and library in Dublin. It was established in Ireland in 1953, to house the collections of mining magnate, Sir Alfred Chester Beatty. The present museum, on the grounds of Dublin Castle, opened on 7 February 2000, the 125th anniversary of Beatty's birth and was named European Museum of the Year in 2002.
The Book of Abraham is a collection of writings from several Egyptian scrolls discovered in the early 19th century during an archeological expedition by Antonio Lebolo. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints purchased the scrolls from a traveling mummy exhibition on July 3, 1835, to be translated into English by Joseph Smith. According to Smith, the book was "a translation of some ancient records... purporting to be the writings of Abraham, while he was in Egypt, called the Book of Abraham, written by his own hand, upon papyrus". Smith said the papyri described Abraham's early life, his travels to Canaan and Egypt, and his vision of the cosmos and its creation.
The Elephantine Papyri and Ostraca consist of thousands of documents from the Egyptian border fortresses of Elephantine and Aswan, which yielded hundreds of papyri and ostraca in hieratic and demotic Egyptian, Aramaic, Koine Greek, Latin and Coptic, spanning a period of 100 years in the 5th to 4th centuries BCE. The documents include letters and legal contracts from family and other archives, and are thus an invaluable source of knowledge for scholars of varied disciplines such as epistolography, law, society, religion, language and onomastics. The Elephantine documents include letters and legal contracts from family and other archives: divorce documents, the manumission of slaves, and other business. The dry soil of Upper Egypt preserved the documents.
The Vergilius Vaticanus, also known as Vatican Virgil, is a Late Antique illuminated manuscript containing fragments of Virgil's Aeneid and Georgics. It was made in Rome in around 400 CE, and is one of the oldest surviving sources for the text of the Aeneid. It is the oldest and one of only three ancient illustrated manuscripts of classical literature.
The Vergilius Romanus, also known as the Roman Vergil, is a 5th-century illustrated manuscript of the works of Virgil. It contains the Aeneid, the Georgics, and some of the Eclogues. It is one of the oldest and most important Vergilian manuscripts. It is 332 by 323 mm with 309 vellum folios. It was written in rustic capitals with 18 lines per page.
The Cotton Genesis is a 4th- or 5th-century Greek Illuminated manuscript copy of the Book of Genesis. It was a luxury manuscript with many miniatures. It is one of the oldest illustrated biblical codices to survive to the modern period. Most of the manuscript was destroyed in the Cotton library fire in 1731, leaving only eighteen charred, shrunken scraps of vellum. From the remnants, the manuscript appears to have been more than 440 pages with approximately 340-360 illustrations that were framed and inserted into the text column. Many miniatures were also copied in the 17th century and are now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris.
The Edwin Smith Papyrus is an ancient Egyptian medical text, named after Edwin Smith who bought it in 1862, and the oldest known surgical treatise on trauma. From a cited quotation in another text, it may have been known to ancient surgeons as the "Secret Book of the Physician".
Ancient Egyptian art refers to art produced in ancient Egypt between the 6th millennium BC and the 4th century AD, spanning from Prehistoric Egypt until the Christianization of Roman Egypt. It includes paintings, sculptures, drawings on papyrus, faience, jewelry, ivories, architecture, and other art media. It was a conservative tradition whose style changed very little over time. Much of the surviving examples comes from tombs and monuments, giving insight into the ancient Egyptian afterlife beliefs.
The Oxyrhynchus Papyri are a group of manuscripts discovered during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by papyrologists Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt at an ancient rubbish dump near Oxyrhynchus in Egypt.
Papyrus 44, signed by 𝔓44, is an early copy of the New Testament in Greek. It is a papyrus manuscript of the Gospel of Matthew and Gospel of John. It contains Matt. 17:1-3.6-7; 18:15-17.19; 25:8-10 and John 10:8-14. Fragments of the Gospel of John formerly known as Papyrus 44b have been reclassified as Papyrus 128. The manuscript paleographically has been assigned to the 6th or 7th century.
Dirk D. Obbink is an American papyrologist and classicist. He was Lecturer in Papyrology and Greek Literature in the Faculty of Classics at Oxford University until 6 February 2021, and was the head of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri Project until August 2016. Obbink was also a fellow and tutor in Greek at Christ Church Oxford, from which role he was suspended in October 2019, as a result of allegations that he had stolen some of the Oxyrhynchus papyri and sold them to the Museum of the Bible.
The Turin Erotic Papyrus is an ancient Egyptian papyrus scroll-painting that was created during the Ramesside Period, approximately in 1150 B.C. Discovered in Deir el-Medina in the early 19th century, it has been dubbed the "world's first men's mag". Measuring 8.5 feet (2.6 m) by 10 inches (25 cm), it consists of two parts, one of which contains twelve erotic vignettes depicting various sex positions. It is currently housed by the Museo Egizio in Turin, Italy.
Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 29 is a fragment of the second book of the Elements of Euclid in Greek. It was discovered by Grenfell and Hunt in 1897 in Oxyrhynchus. The fragment was originally dated to the end of the third century or the beginning of the fourth century, although more recent scholarship suggests a date of 75–125 CE. It is housed in the library of the University of Pennsylvania. The text was published by Grenfell and Hunt in 1898.
Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 233 is a fragment of Demosthenes' speech Against Timocrates, written in Greek. It was discovered in Oxyrhynchus. The manuscript was written on papyrus in the form of a roll. It is dated to the third century. Currently it is housed in the museum of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
Papyrus 137 is an early fragment of the New Testament in Greek. The fragment is from a codex, written on both sides with text from the first chapter of the Gospel of Mark; verses 7–9 on the recto side and 16–18 on the verso side. The manuscript has been dated paleographically to the later 2nd or earlier 3rd century, and has been published in the Oxyrhynchus papyrus series as P.Oxy. LXXXIII 5345.
Papyrus 3053 is a papyrus fragment about 12.7 cm × 15.2 cm now kept in the British Library. It was probably made in Roman Egypt between the 3rd and 6th centuries AD. It was found at Oxyrhynchus among other documents mostly of the 3rd century and was given to the library in 1962. At the time, T. C. Skeat called it "a most notable addition to the very scanty remains of classical book-illustration".
