At Bulgaria ’s National Museum of History , there lives a Quran comprising six pages of beaten 24 - carat gold covered with Etruscan handwriting , one of the few writing organization assimilator have yet to decipher . It features illustration of a horse - rider , a mermaid , a harp and soldier [ source : BBC News ] .
According to reports , the book , display in 2003 , was estimated at about 2,500 years former . It was find along the Strouma River in southwestern Bulgaria in an old grave , and was donated to the museum by the finder , who stay anon. . Its long time and legitimacy were confirm by two autonomous scientists , whose names also remain unknown .
This book is often quote as the world ’s oldest Scripture because it is the oldest book bear several pages that we screw about . There are older pages around but not bound together in a Holy Writ . But the case is n’t closed .
The question of what is the oldest book in the domain will likely never be resolve . First , there ’s the query of what exactly is a Holy Scripture . Books are slippy artefact . imagine of your favorite novel . It has a physical mien , a specific shape and form that fit on a shelf and requires dusting .
It also has a intangible material body — the chronicle itself , what it means to you and the store and enjoyment it conjures . So is the book a mere strong-arm mien , or is the contentedness more important than the build ? Or do they both play a role ? Take it a footstep further and demand what if your favourite book was n’t impress but handwritten , would it still be a book ? What about if you read it on an electronic gimmick ?
If printing defined what a book was , then the oldest book would be the Gutenberg Bible , printed in about 1450 . Of naturally , that was print with transportable type . Chinese cultures were printing pages of booklike structures using carved wood plates and dim-witted military press hundreds of yr before Gutenberg .
Now take the Egyptian pharaohs . Their scribes were creating songs and supplication to them close to 3,000 days ago , but these were on paper rush scrolls , which could be considered a book , albeit with only one very long Sir Frederick Handley Page .
" These are questions scholars are still squirm with , " said Laurent Ferri , conservator of uncommon Holy Writ and manuscripts at Cornell University whom we interviewed in 2010 . " For me , a book would be defined by having a binding and back a world view . "
By this definition , the collection of clay tablets maintained by Cornell — also the orotund aggregation in the universe — would n’t be considered the world ’s oldest books . They are n’t bind , and most are legal transactions or fiscal accountings and do not espouse a worldview .
With his own definition in intellect , Ferri state his bet on the oldest books in the world would be Homer ’s " Iliad , " and the " Epic of Gilgamesh . " Indeed , the British Museum ’s version of the Gilgamesh fib , write on clay tablets , dates to about the seventh hundred B.C.E. However , the tablets are n’t restrain , so they ’re technically not a leger , but they do come close-fitting , especially in the sense they propose a certain view of the world . But we do n’t really know when the stories started or how they acquire .
" This is another place to view , " Ferri say . " These ( two stories ) are the Cartesian product of a very long oral tradition . We sleep together rough when the text was fixed , but the fib pre - existed the physical book . "
And so the questions bend . Some people think the Bible was written shortly after the humanity was make , get it the oldest leger . Yet biblical scholars lie with thebooks that make up the Biblewere write over many century and that many of the stories let in in it were set down centuries after the events they recorded come about .
Bringing religion , or worldviews , into the inquiry beget more twists and turns . The I Ching , the fundament al-Qur’an for Taoist philosophy , was allegedly written by Lao - Tze more than 2,000 years ago . Pharaonic text exist with a similar vintage . There are probable other more obscure religions that claim to have a toehold in one C further in the past and that their more recent printings are merely modern reflection of ancient schoolbook .
For Ferri , the seeking for the world ’s oldest Holy Scripture is just that — a pursuit .
" If you get the older book you find the oldest truth , the oldest revealing , " he said . " This is a Apocalypse of original things ; this is what humans always search for . So , we ask the questions again and again , ' What is the oldest ? "
So , the question of what is the earthly concern ’s erstwhile ledger will likely never be answer once and for all , and this may not be a bad thing . The simple request of the question seems to lead to insight , whether from an archaeologic perspective or a philosophic linear perspective . And it addresses the ultimate distributor point of books ( whether they ’re on clay tablet or online ) , summed up by Ferri : " We would n’t be human without books . "
