World’s Oldest Book Sold for $3.9 Million at Auction; What Makes Crosby-Schøyen Codex an Exceptional One?

On June 11, the world's oldest book in a private collection was sold at an auction at Christie's auction house in London.

A Rare Christian Manuscript

The bidding for the text started at $2.17 million for a combination of enthusiastic online and in-person bidders. It was finally sold for $3.9 million, including taxes, to a phone bidder who wished to remain anonymous.

Known as the Crosby-Schøyen Codex, this book was discovered in 1952 by a group of Egyptian farmers.The historic Christian manuscript was later acquired in 1955 by the University of Mississippi. Then, it was bought by Martin Schoyen, a Norwegian businessman and rare book collector.

It was originally copied by a monk around the 4th century AD in present-day Egypt. This makes the text at least 1,600 years old, far older than ancient manuscripts like the Gutenberg Bible, which dates from the 1450s. As a matter of fact, Christie's has referred to it as the 'earliest known book in private hands' and 'one of the earliest books in existence.'

Twelve other selected fragments from the Schoyen Collection were also included in the auction along with the prized codex. The entire collection is made of more than 20,000 pieces which span 5,000 years of human history from 3,500 B.C. up to the present.

The sale of Crosby-Schøyen Codex is impressive, but it is far from the highest selling price for a rare manuscript. In 2023, the Codex Sassoon, a Hebrew Bible over 1,000 years old, was sold at Sotheby's in New York for $38.1 million. This surpassed the $30.8 million paid by Bill Gates in 1994 for Leonardo da Vinci's Codex Leicester manuscript.

The first prints of the US Constitution remains to be the most expensive historical book, which was sold at Sotheby's in November 2021 for $43 million.

Historical and Technological Significance of the Codex

The manuscript features five early Christian texts, which were written in Coptic, the language that descended from ancient Egyptian. Among them are the earliest complete copies of the book of Jonah and Peter's first epistle.

It was written on double-sided papyrus leaves, the main writing material in ancient Egypt. However, 52 of its individual sheets (104 pages) are no longer stitched together, so they are currently preserved between plexiglass plates.

Crosby-Schøyen Codex contains texts, which were originally written by five different authors. All five were copied out by the same scribe in the 3rd century AD.

Experts attribute the preservation of the manuscript to the dry climate in Egypt. As Donadoni noted, only a handful of ancient manuscripts from the 3rd and 4th centuries have survived and made it to our present day.

The ancient biblical manuscript represents advances in written technology at a time in history when single-sided scrolls were more commonly used. It is actually an early example of the transition from scroll to the book style that we know today.

There is evidence that codices existed at an earlier time, according to Eugenio Donadoni, senior specialist in medieval and renaissance manuscripts at Christie's. However, none of them have survived. This makes Crosby-Schøyen Codex a unique object not only in the history of Christianity, but also of information technology.