My wife\’s Uncle Dave sent me a link to The Schoyen Collection today. It\’s an enormous private collection of early manuscripts, including not only paper, papyrus, and parchment, but items of pottery, stone, and other materials. This site consists of only a representative portion of the more than 12,000 manuscripts collected. For an idea of its complete scope, take a look at the picture index and the slideshow
My wife\’s Uncle Dave sent me a link to The Schoyen Collection today. It\’s an enormous private collection of early manuscripts, including not only paper, papyrus, and parchment, but items of pottery, stone, and other materials. This site consists of only a representative portion of the more than 12,000 manuscripts collected. For an idea of its complete scope, take a look at the picture index and the slideshowFrom the \”Introduction\” page:
The Schøyen Collection comprises most types of manuscripts from the whole world spanning over 5000 years. It is the largest private manuscript collection formed in the 20th century.
The whole collection, MSS 1-4517, comprises 12,536 manuscript items, including 2,083 volumes.
6,178 manuscript items are from the ancient period, 3200 BC – 500 AD; 3,848 are from the medieval period, 500 – 1500; and 2,510 are post-medieval.
Never before there has been formed a collection with such variety geographically, linguistically, textually, and of scripts, writing materials, etc., over such a great span of time as 5 millennia.
Only a few of the largest National libraries have a similar scope, and even they will not have collections of writings on clay, metals, wood, bone, stone, glass, etc., which normally will be in archaeological museums, and again divided among local museums and National museums.
For instance, there is no public collection that has manuscripts from all the greatest manuscript hoards in combination, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, The Cairo Genizah of Hebrew MSS, The Oxyrhynchus hoard of classical papyri, The Dishna Biblical papyri, The Nag Hammadi Gnostic papyri, the Dunhuang hoard of Buddhist MSS, etc. The Schøyen Collection has materials from all these hoards and others as well.
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