Paleography before 1100 CE

not including Chinese calligraphy
Except otherwise stated, all results include the premium.
​See also : Manuscript  Judaica  Egypt  Ancient science  Illuminated Christian manuscript
​Chronology : 1-1000

Neo-Babylonian Cuneiform Cylinder
2014 SOLD for $ 605K by Doyle

The cuneiform writing appeared in Mesopotamia more than 5000 years ago. It was carved by scribes on clay tablets which can take various geometries : planar surfaces, cylinders, cones, pebbles.

At the inauguration of a religious monument, it was common that the reasons of its consecration to a specific god are recorded on such clay structures, in a tight writing. The original tablets were buried in the foundations of the new temple as a symbol of the everlasting and mystical glory of the reigning monarch.

One may wonder why such a literary and historiographical attempt was made for being immediately hidden. I guess that these plates were also used as seals or at least as models to create more fragile copies that have not survived.

The temples of the city of Sippar, between Baghdad and Babylon, housed one of the biggest cuneiform libraries.

On April 9, 2014, Doyle sold for $ 605K from a lower estimate of 300K a large barrel shaped cylinder 21 cm long, which is devoted to the reconstruction of a temple to the sun god Shamash at Sippar by Nabu-kudurri-usur 2600 years ago.

Better known with his Biblical name of Nebuchadnezzar II, this king of the Neo-Babylonian dynasty was one of the most powerful monarchs of antiquity, considered by the Jews as an intimidating enemy of monotheism. The creation of the legendary Hanging Gardens of Babylon is attributed to his sumptuous reign.

breakthrough
3rd century BCE to 1st century CE Dead Sea Scrolls
Israel Museum in Jerusalem and Jordan Museum in Amman

The example below is shared by Wikimedia.
Great Isaiah Scroll

around 300 CE Coptic Codex
2024 SOLD for £ 3.07M by Christie's

In the early 1950s a manuscript on papyrus in a bold Coptic script was unearthed from a cache in dry sands of Upper Egypt. The now extinct Coptic was the language used by St. Anthony, the first Christian ascetic hermit of the desert from about 275 CE.

It is arguably the earliest surviving Christian liturgical book. The texts are dispositioned in two columns per page, all by the same scribe. The pages were originally paginated up to 136 in a square format 146 x 152 mm of 68 folios. 51 folios are remaining. Some pages are complete. A few corrections above the line had been made by the scribe.

This codex is dated from middle 3rd century to early 4th century from paleographic considerations. That period was confirmed in 2020 by radiocarbon analysis. At that time literary texts wee still preserved in papyrus rolls. The Christian church was encouraging the adoption of the user friendly codex format for enduring records, with both sides being written on. The pages in a codex are stitched together.

This work is therefore contemporary to the invention in Egypt around 320 of the monastic life by St. Pachomius in the follow of St. Anthony.

Its five texts include the complete Biblical books 1-Peter and Jonah. The Peri Pascha Meliton and the 2-Maccabees are incomplete. A non Biblical text may be a homily for the use of a monastic community. The whole constitutes a lectionary related to the Easter themes of martyrdom and resurrection. The Jewish Maccabees had been early monotheistic martyrs, and the Jewish story of Jonah and the whale prefigures the resurrection of Christ.

It was identified as the Crosby codex from a donator of the University of Mississippi where it remained until 1981, and later as the Crosby-Schøyen codex after Mr Schøyen managed to re-unite some fragments to the parent manuscript.

It was sold for £ 3.07M from a lower estimate of £ 2M by Christie's on June 11, 2024, lot 1 in the sale of the Schøyen collection. The papyruses have been vacuum sealed within double-sided archival plexiglass plates. Please watch the video shared by the auction house.

Byzantine Era - the Ten Commandments
2024 for sale on December 18 by Sotheby's

An inscribed tablet on marble 63 x 56 x 6.2 cm weighing 52 kg surfaced in 1913 during an excavation for a railroad in the city of Yavne where the sanhedrin had been re-established after the destruction by the Romans of the temple of Jerusalem. There had been successively at the spot of the excavation a Samaritan synagogue, a Christian church for the Crusaders and a mosque.

It was used by the finder as a paving stone in his house. His son sold it to an archaeologist in 1943. The neatly chiseled text is a full version of the Mosaic Ten Commandments. It does not include the currently numbered 3rd commandment (You shall not take the name of the Lord in vain) which had been considered as questionable in some periods. The letters have a width of 1 to 2 cm.

In 1947 the historian Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, later a president of the state of Israel, analyzed it as made of a paleo Hebrew alphabet which was still in use by the Samaritans in the late Byzantine era between 300 CE and 800 CE. The Samaritans were apart religiously and ethnically from the Jews.

The Yavne tablet is estimated $ 1M for sale by Sotheby's on December 18, 2024, lot 1. Please watch the video shared by the auction house.

650 The Qur'an of Caliph Uthman
2008 SOLD for £ 2.5M by Christie's

The witnesses to the revelations of Muhammad were disappearing, decimated by the wars. During the Caliphate of Abu Bakr, a complete written version of the Qur'an became essential. The work was managed by Zayd ibn Thabit who had been a scribe of the Prophet.

The risk of spreading dialect variants that will provoke sterile theological debates is too great. Caliph Uthman (Osman) commissioned the same expert to establish a canonical version of the Qur'an in a single Arabic dialect, henceforth prohibiting any modification of the text. The annalists do not mention this work which was carried out around 30 AH (matching 650 CE).

A Qur'an leaf 36 x 28 cm was sold for £ 2.5M from a lower estimate of £ 100K by Christie's on April 8, 2008, lot 20, for £ 2.5M. The image is shared by Wikimedia.

This double-sided manuscript folio is a palimpsest. The original text in Hijazi script was erased before the 9th century CE to reuse the vellum. The oldest text had left a corrosion in the vellum and it has reappeared over time.

It was of course sacrilege to erase a sacred text. One possible reason for this action was that the original manuscript was very early and did not fully meet Uthman's canon.

A leaf palimpsest from the same original codex was sold for £ 163K by Christie's on May 1, 2001, lot 12.

2nd half 7th century Hijazi Qur'an Sheet

In the follow of the master copy prepared ca 650 CE by the scribe Zayd ibn Thabit, the same scribe supervised the realization of copies for the use of the principal Islamic cities, with an attention for a faithful reproduction of the Qur'anic text. Four to seven were made in Hijazi script, in vertical format, some in sheets and some bound as a codex.

The next paleographic evolution is an effort for readability by the invention of marks for consonants in 688 CE and colored dots for identifying the vowels.

A large fragment on parchment in the early evolution of the script from Hijazi to Kufic around 700 CE was sold for £ 121K by Sotheby's on October 3, 2012, lot 11.

1
​surat Maryam
​2020 SOLD for £ 920K by Christie's

A very large fragment 34.5 x 31 cm with extracts from the Maryam surat was sold for £ 920K from a lower estimate of £ 250K by Christie's on October 28, 2020, lot 100.

It is written in sepia ink on vellum and includes vocalisation and verse markers.

2
​2010 SOLD for £ 600K by Sotheby's

A vellum fragment is written in brown ink with 21 lines on each side, without vocalisation. It is legible despite various holes, creases and stains. It was sold for £ 600K from a lower estimate of £ 100K by Sotheby's on October 6, 2010, lot 3.

A vellum fragment 37.5 x 27.5 cm is written in brown ink with 23 lines on the obverse and 21 on the reverse. The lower side is much damaged. They are fragments of the Ibrahim surat. It was sold for £ 480K by Sotheby's on October 8, 2008, lot 3.

8th century Qur'an Palimpsest
​2018 SOLD for £ 600K by Christies

A previously unrecorded set of nine fragmentary folios in vellum of a Qur'an palimpsest was sold for £ 600K from a lower estimate of £ 80K by Christie's on April 26, 2018, lot 1. It is illustrated in the post sale release of the auction house. The largest fragment is 11 x 12.7 cm.

The original manuscript is a Coptic Bible from ca 2nd century, more precisely the Book of Deuteronomy. The palimpsest had been written in Egypt ca the 8th century CE, in the period of the Arab conquest. It is made of parts of Qur'an V, sura al-ma'ida and of Qur'an VI, sura al-an'am.

< 835 Carolingian Gospels
2015 SOLD for £ 2M by Christie's

The Christian texts, mainly Gospel books and sacramentaries, were copied by scribes for being used by bishops and abbeys. Desiring to match the luxury and reputation of Constantinople, Charlemagne conducted political reforms that offered a considerable originality in terms of culture.

Unlike their predecessors the Merovingians, the Carolingians did not neglect the role of the Church. The creation of a religious teaching in 789 clearly identified its purpose to combat ignorance and had as a direct consequence an increase in the activity of  the copyists.

Metz is not far from Aachen, and Charlemagne created in that city one of his imperial necropoles. The place that included many abbeys became an important intellectual center. Drogo, an illegitimate son of Charlemagne, became bishop of Metz in 823. His masterpiece, unfinished at his death in 855, is an illuminated book of prayers.

For several centuries, the Gospel books included the four Gospels with prefaces and comments, preceded by a Canon table for the concordance between the texts and followed by a capitulary with the list of celebrations. The four elements of the Canon table are separated within an arched portico lavishly painted.

On July 15, 2015, Christie's sold for £ 2M from a lower estimate of £ 1M a remarkably complete manuscript on vellum in very good condition, known as the Gospels of Queen Theutberga, lot 20.

This book was made in the early ninth century, most likely in Metz. Despite the luxury scripts, it does not include decorative initials, increasing its presumption of a very ancient execution. The list of celebrations do not mention the feast of All Saints which became an obligation of the official liturgy in 835.

900 CE Hebrew Bible with Masorah
2023 SOLD for $ 38M by Sotheby's

With the exception of the Dead Sea Scrolls, early Bible manuscripts did not survive although some Jewish literature from the so called silent period had been found in the Cairo Genizah.

One of the earliest surviving Bibles remains nearly complete in all its three parts : Pentateuch, Prophets, and Writings. Its Hebrew text is as the Jews are still using it in current days.

Already exceptional in its time, it was written around 900 CE by a single scribe on 400 30 x 36 cm parchment leaves that had required about 200 sheepskins. This manuscript includes punctuations and vowels for a better readability.

It was assembled as a codex, an antique technique recently forwarded to the Jews through the Muslims, much easier to use than a scroll, by which sheets inscribed with text in both sides were folded and sewn together.

Precise instructions on how to recite and understand it, known as the Masorah, were added in the margins.  The Masoretic Bibles were used as references and not for liturgy and are extremely rare. Due to Rabbinic rules no similar system applied in the scrolls. The Masoretes were scholars-scribes who were also entrusted to maintain the text of the Bible unchanged throughout the generations.

Used for private worship in its first centuries, it was donated in the 13th century CE to a synagogue in Makisin, a town in Syria that was soon destroyed during the Mongol or Timurid invasions. Out of view after that event, the codex resurfaced as a time capsule in 1929, acquired in Frankfurt through a librarian by the scholar David Sassoon who was assembling the largest and most important private collection of Hebrew manuscripts in the world.

Remaining in private hands, it was sold for $ 38M from a lower estimate of $ 30M by Sotheby's on May 17, 2023, lot 1. This historical document weighs 11.8 Kg. It had been rebound by Sassoon. Only about 12 folios are missing.

A similar example is the Aleppo Codex prepared ca 930 CE, of which nearly 40 % of the pages were lost in the 1950s.

second half 10th century  the Archimedes Palimpsest
1998 SOLD for $ 2.2M by Christie's

Parchment was expensive and religious writings had nevertheless to be released on a durable support. The copyists of the Middle Ages made palimpsests, which we could also refer as cannibalizations. They erased the original text by scraping or wetting it and then wrote over it. Many antique texts were thus lost because their support was still in good condition.

Sometimes the deleted text reappears after several centuries because its ink has permeated the parchment. The original writing of a palimpsest on vellum which was kept in a religious library in Constantinople is correctly identified in 1906 as a scientific treatise by Archimedes.

The upper manuscript is a liturgical work in Greek copied in the 12th century. The scribe has carefully reused the leaves from a thick codex on which he has written his text at 90° to the original text before folding each page into a bifolium for a total of 177 sheets 20 x 15 cm.

The photo below gives the example of an unfolded bifolium on which the two writings are perfectly visible at 90° to each other. The copyright of this image shared by Wikimedia is held by the Walters Museum of Baltimore with a reference to their site dedicated to the palimpsest.

The Archimedes palimpsest resurfaced in 1996 in fairly poor condition, with three missing pages and four pages made illegible by modern illustrations. It was sold for $ 2.2M by Christie's on October 29, 1998, lot 1.

The original texts were studied in detail before the sale, and still more since the sale with the most modern imagery techniques by a team from the Walters Art Museum where the new owner deposited the book.

Written in Greek most probably in Constantinople in the second half of the 10th century, they consist of seven scientific treatises by Archimedes, two of which were previously unknown, plus a few pages from an antique Greek orator.

The previously unpublished texts provide a new and incomparable vision on the scientific method of Archimedes, specifically when he compares volumes and surfaces, constituting didactic puzzles which anticipate by nearly two millennia the modern methods of analysis.

979 Sinaiticus Palimpsest by John Zosimus
2024 SOLD for £ 1.25M by Christie's

John Zosimus was an expatriate Georgian monk who moved in 973 CE to Mount Sinai from a monastery in the Judaean desert. A keen promoter of the Georgian language against the official Greek of the empire in the millenarian anticipation of Judgment Day, he was a scribe, a calligrapher, a poet and a bookbinder.

A rescriptus codex of 70 vellum leaves in Georgian has survived. It had been written as a palimpsest over a Christian Aramaic from six disparate faded manuscripts datable to the 5th to 7th century, mostly at a right angle between the two scripts. This Aramaic is very close to the language spoken in Palestine at the time of Jesus. Some of these sources had probably been brought from Judaea.

That work was signed and dated by 'Ioane' in Georgian year 6583, 979 CE. The binding in black leather and linen over stout palm wooden boards from Mount Sinai is signed, and dated from the same year. It had to be restored but remains as the earliest surviving dated binding. It still has the hole for one of the five sewing stations of the codex.

The codex was sold for £ 1.25M by Christie's on June 11, 2024, lot 4 in the sale of the Schøyen collection. Its current binding size is 20 x 15 cm.