The world's oldest book belonging to a private collection, and one of the earliest books in existence, has been sold at auction in London for more than £3 million.
The Crosby-Schoen Codex was owned by Norwegian businessman and rare book collector Martin Schoen and contains the earliest complete copies of two texts from the Bible - the Book of Jonah and the First Epistle of Peter, AFP reported.
Bidding for the text at Christie's auction house started at £1.7 million for a mix of enthusiastic online and in-person bidders.
The text was sold for £3,065,000 including taxes to an anonymous phone bidder.
The codex was discovered by Egyptian farmers in the 1950s.
It was originally transcribed by a monk in present-day Egypt around the 4th century AD, making it at least 1,600 years old and far older than more famous ancient texts such as the Gutenberg Bible, which dates from the 1450s.
Written in the Coptic language on double-sided papyrus leaves now preserved between plates of Plexiglas, the ancient biblical text represents an advance in writing technology at a time when single-sided scrolls were more common.
Along with the literary gem, twelve other selected items from the Schoen Collection were offered at auction.
The entire collection consists of more than 20,000 exhibits that span 5,000 years of history from 3,500 BC to the present, according to the collection's website.
While impressive, the sale is far from the highest selling price for a rare text.
Last year, the Codex Sassoon - a Jewish Bible more than 1,000 years old - sold for $38.1 million at Sotheby's in New York, a new record.
That topped the $30.8 million that Microsoft founder Bill Gates paid in 1994 for Leonardo da Vinci's manuscript of the Leicester Codex.
The most expensive historical document remains one of the first prints of the U.S. Constitution, which Sotheby's sold for $43 million in November 2021 | BGNES
