Antiquity

The Standard Babylonian version of Gilgamesh, engraved on 12 clay tablets around 1300 to 1000 BCE and copied for the library of As...

A 2.25 meter diorite stela inscribed around 1754 BCE with 282 laws of Babylonian king Hammurabi, the longest surviving legal text ...

Around 382 clay tablets of diplomatic correspondence from the 14th century BCE between pharaohs Amenhotep III and Akhenaten and ru...

Thousands of clay tablets from the Minoan palace at Knossos, written in Linear B and dated around 1400 to 1200 BCE. Michael Ventri...

A colossal rock relief carved high on a cliff around 520 BCE for Darius I of Persia, recounting his victories in Old Persian, Elam...

A small clay barrel inscribed in Babylonian cuneiform around 539 BCE after Cyrus of Persia conquered Babylon. It presents Cyrus re...

A clay tablet from the 6th century BCE bearing the oldest known map of the world, with Babylon at the center, the Euphrates, surro...

The oldest surviving surgical treatise, copied around 1600 BCE from a text perhaps a thousand years older. Its 48 cases describe h...

A 20 meter medical papyrus of around 1550 BCE, among the oldest and longest medical texts known. It covers hundreds of remedies, d...

The finest surviving Egyptian mathematics text, copied around 1550 BCE by the scribe Ahmose. Its 84 problems handle fractions, are...

The finest surviving illustrated Egyptian funerary papyrus, about 24 meters long, prepared for the royal scribe Ani around 1250 BC...

A beautifully painted papyrus from around 1280 BCE made for Hunefer, overseer of royal cattle. Its elegant vignettes show the judg...

A granodiorite stela carved in 196 BCE with a priestly decree honoring Ptolemy V in hieroglyphic, demotic, and Greek scripts. Foun...

The oldest substantially intact manuscript found in Greece, carbonized and preserved in a tomb at Derveni, dated around 340 BCE. I...

Over 1,800 carbonized papyrus rolls from the Villa of the Papyri, buried by Vesuvius in 79 CE. Mostly works of the Epicurean philo...

Half a million papyrus fragments excavated from rubbish mounds of Oxyrhynchus since 1897 by Grenfell and Hunt. They include lost G...

Around 981 manuscripts found in 11 caves near Qumran between 1947 and 1956, dating from the 3rd century BCE to the 1st century CE....

The best preserved of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a complete scroll of Isaiah copied around 125 BCE and found in 1947. It is about a tho...

A unique Dead Sea Scroll etched on thin copper sheets around 25 to 75 CE, listing 64 hiding places of gold, silver, and vessels, p...

Thirteen leather-bound papyrus codices found by a farmer in 1945 near Nag Hammadi, copied in the 4th century CE. Written in Coptic...

One of the two oldest complete Greek Bibles, written around 330 to 360 CE on parchment in uncial script. Found at St Catherine Mon...

The other great 4th century Greek Bible, cataloged in the Vatican Library by 1475 and prized as perhaps the oldest near-complete N...

A 5th century Greek Bible of the whole Old and New Testaments, brought from Alexandria to Constantinople and presented to King Cha...

A lavishly illustrated 5th century manuscript of Virgil Aeneid and Georgics, among the oldest surviving illustrated classical book...

Twenty-nine birch bark scrolls in Kharoshthi script acquired by the British Library in 1994, dating to the 1st century CE. They ar...

Seventy fragile birch bark leaves of practical mathematics, radiocarbon dated between the 3rd and 4th centuries CE. It contains th...

A bilingual manuscript of the Gospels and Acts from around 400, with Greek on the left page and Latin on the right. Its text depar...

A group of early Christian papyrus codices bought by mining magnate Alfred Chester Beatty in the early 1930s. They include P45, P4...

A papyrus scrap the size of a credit card carrying lines from John 18 on both sides, often cited as the earliest known fragment of...

A small papyrus sheet acquired in Egypt by the collector W. L. Nash and published in 1903, containing the Ten Commandments followe...