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The following is a list of the world's oldest surviving physical documents. Each entry is the most ancient of each language or civilization. For example, the Narmer Palette may be the most ancient from Egypt, but there are many other surviving written documents from Egypt later than the Narmer Palette but still more ancient than the Missal of Silos.
The Second Book of Enoch (abbreviated as 2 Enoch and also known as Slavonic Enoch, Slavic Enoch, or the Secrets of Enoch) is a pseudepigraphic text in the apocalyptic genre. It describes the ascent of the patriarch Enoch, ancestor of Noah, through ten heavens of an Earth-centered cosmos. The Slavonic edition and translation of 2 Enoch is of ...
The Codex Gigas opened to the page with the distinctive portrait of the Devil from which the text received its byname, the Devil's Bible. [1]The Codex Gigas ("Giant Book"; Czech: Obří kniha) is the largest extant medieval illuminated manuscript in the world, at a length of 92 cm (36 in). [2]
The 104-page Crosby-Schøyen Codex from Egypt was written by a single scribe over 40 years, dating back to 250–350 AD.
Shang Yang: Book of Lord Shang (Shāng jūn shū) Shizi: Book of Master Shi; Guiguzi: Sage of Ghost Valley; Huangdi Sijing: Yellow Emperor's Four Classics; Tale of King Mu, Son of Heaven (Mù Tiānzǐ Zhuàn) Wuzi: Wu Qi's Art of War; Sun Bin's Art of War (Sūn Bìn Bīngfǎ) The Methods of the Sima (Sīmǎ Fǎ) Li Kui: Book of Law; Persian ...
The Book of the Dead of Hunefer, c. 1275 BCE, ink and pigments on papyrus, in the British Museum (London). After extracting the marrow from the stems of papyrus reed, a series of steps (humidification, pressing, drying, gluing, and cutting) produced media of variable quality, the best being used for sacred writing. [10]
The religious texts were compiled by different religious communities into various official collections. The earliest contained the first five books of the Bible, called the Torah in Hebrew and the Pentateuch (meaning five books) in Greek. The second-oldest part was a collection of narrative histories and prophecies (the Nevi'im).
An extreme case is the Vedic Sanskrit of the Rigveda: the earliest parts of this text date to c. 1500 BC, [1] while the oldest known manuscripts date to c. 1040 AD. [2] Similarly the oldest Avestan texts, the Gathas , are believed to have been composed before 1000 BC, but the oldest Avestan manuscripts date from the 13th century AD.