An Exhibition of Superlative Books: The Oldest Book in the World

 

The half-life of an e-book is much briefer than that of a print book. Though only a sensible guess, this dose of reality reminds us of the fragility of books and the variable changes in the technologies that make them. Naming the oldest print book depends on our definition of the word ‘print’. In Europe, that honour symbolically goes to the Gutenberg Bible (circa 1450-55), the first book to be made using mass-produced moveable-type. In Asia, it is a copy of the Buddhist holy text, the Diamond Sutra (CE 868). This rare book is made up of Chinese characters printed on a scroll of grey print paper, wrapped along a wooden pole and is considered the oldest surviving printed book in the world. In the Americas, the Aztecs made books, but the print book came with the conquest of Mexico. A printing press arrived there in 1539 and the first book was delivered five years later: ‘Doctrina Breve’, by the first bishop of Mexico, Juan de Zumarraga. Religion also has everything to do with the first printed book in Africa. ‘Abudarham’ is a Jewish liturgical text first published by Samuel Nedivot and his son Isaac in Lisbon in 1489. They republished the book, virtually unchanged, in Fez in Morocco in 1516, after having endured the Jewish expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula. The Church Missionary Society printer William Colenso produced New Zealand’s first book, a 16-page pamphlet of Ephesians and Philippians translated into Maori (1835). The first book to be published in Australia breaks the religious theme. It was the ‘New South Wales Standing Orders’ (1802), of which the website of the State Library of NSW notes drolly, “It was not a best-seller.” None of these books are the oldest in the world, of course, nor do we know if they have reached their half-life. To cut to the chase, the oldest book contains illustrations of a horse-rider, a mermaid, a harp, and soldiers. It is the Orphic six-pack called the Etruscan Gold Book (pictured), made out of 24-carat gold, dating from 600 BCE. The linked six gold sheets were discovered in 1955 in Bulgaria, which is why it is on display in the National History Museum in Sofia. Except that it’s not a book, according to the highly credible Erik Kwakkel, who defines a book as, historically speaking, a folding codex. For him, the oldest book is out there somewhere, it predates the Book of Kells (CE 800, pictured), which itself just predates the Diamond Sutra book, but after that it’s up to us to find it, or make our own judgement: https://medievalfragments.wordpress.com/2013/12/20/what-is-the-oldest-book-in-the-world/