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Oy dats a lotta shekels
Personally, I would never want to own something of real historic value. I prefer it be in a museum of some sort. I would rather own functional than valuable.
Surprised the guy is touching it with bare hands.
Oo La La! (Sassoon Codex?)
792 pages on parchment. Producing 396 book leaves of parchment from the hides of sheep or calves is no easy task. It represents a very large investment of labor.
Note that a printing press is of little value if the medium you are using is as expensive to produce as parchment.
In the two centuries before Gutenberg the growing abundance of linen rags and the adoption of wind power for hammering linen rags into paper making pulp drastically reduced the cost of paper. Only because of this was Gutenberg’s movable type an economically useful invention.
only 1,100-year-old?...................
I have spent a decent amount of time on the Codex Sinaiticus website. One can read the actual text from the codex.
An excellent primer on the construction techniques of ancient manuscripts.
Codex Sinaiticus is one of the most important books in the world. Handwritten well over 1600 years ago, the manuscript contains the Christian Bible in Greek, including the oldest complete copy of the New Testament. Its heavily corrected text is of outstanding importance for the history of the Bible and the manuscript – the oldest substantial book to survive Antiquity – is of supreme importance for the history of the book.