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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 identified texts fall into three general groups: About 40% are copies of texts from Hebrew scriptures. Approximately 30% are texts from the Second Temple period that ultimately were not canonized in the Hebrew Bible, such as the Book of Enoch, the Book of Jubilees, the Book of Tobit, the Wisdom of Sirach, Psalms 152–155, etc.
The history of scrolls dates back to ancient Egypt. In most ancient literate cultures scrolls were the earliest format for longer documents written in ink or paint on a flexible background, preceding bound books ; [ 2 ] rigid media such as clay tablets were also used but had many disadvantages in comparison.
In September 2016, Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, successfully used virtual unrolling to read the text of a charred parchment from Israel, the En-Gedi Scroll. [ 32 ] [ 33 ]
There were three main materials used for the pages of books in this time period: papyrus, parchment or vellum, and paper (Alexander 35). Papyrus was the primary writing material of the ancient world, and was created by beating stalks of the papyrus reed together until the fibers in the plant formed a tight, almost woven structure.
The parchments could be reused after scraping off the ink of the old texts, and writing new books on the previously used parchment, creating what is called a palimpsest. [21] Fortunately for modern scholars, the old writing can still be retrieved, and many extremely valuable works, which would have otherwise been lost, have been recovered in ...
Papyrus narrating the story of the wise chancellor Ahiqar. Aramaic script. 5th century BCE. From Elephantine, Egypt. Neues Museum, Berlin. 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 ...
The Ketef Hinnom scrolls, also described as Ketef Hinnom amulets, are the oldest surviving texts currently known from the Hebrew Bible, dated to c. 600 BCE. [2] The text, written in the Paleo-Hebrew script (not the Babylonian square letters of the modern Hebrew alphabet, more familiar to most modern readers), is from the Book of Numbers in the Hebrew Bible, and has been described as "one of ...