Martin Schøyen
Encyclopedia
Martin Schøyen is a Norwegian
Norway
Norway , officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic unitary constitutional monarchy whose territory comprises the western portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula, Jan Mayen, and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and Bouvet Island. Norway has a total area of and a population of about 4.9 million...

 businessman, traveller, historian, paleographer and collector of books
Book collecting
Book collecting is the collecting of books, including seeking, locating, acquiring, organizing, cataloging, displaying, storing, and maintaining whatever books are of interest to a given individual collector. The love of books is bibliophilia, and someone who loves to read, admire, and collect...

.

He started collecting books in 1955. Currently his private collection, the Schøyen Collection, contains above 13 000 manuscript items, the oldest book is about 5000 years old.

Some manuscripts

  • Biblical manuscript in Coptic language
    Coptic language
    Coptic or Coptic Egyptian is the current stage of the Egyptian language, a northern Afro-Asiatic language spoken in Egypt until at least the 17th century. Egyptian began to be written using the Greek alphabet in the 1st century...

    , dated to the 3rd century (http://www.schoyencollection.com/Coptic.htm)
  • 15 Dead Sea Scrolls
    Dead Sea scrolls
    The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of 972 texts from the Hebrew Bible and extra-biblical documents found between 1947 and 1956 on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, from which they derive their name...

  • Sumer
    Sumer
    Sumer was a civilization and historical region in southern Mesopotamia, modern Iraq during the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age....

    ian text from the 21st century B.C.; Ur-Nammu
    Ur-Nammu
    Ur-Nammu founded the Sumerian 3rd dynasty of Ur, in southern Mesopotamia, following several centuries of Akkadian and Gutian rule...

    's law-code
  • Babylonian calendar from 2000-1600 B.C.
  • Tutankhamun
    Tutankhamun
    Tutankhamun , Egyptian , ; approx. 1341 BC – 1323 BC) was an Egyptian pharaoh of the 18th dynasty , during the period of Egyptian history known as the New Kingdom...

    's signet ring
  • MS 5236, an ancient Greek
    Ancient Greek
    Ancient Greek is the stage of the Greek language in the periods spanning the times c. 9th–6th centuries BC, , c. 5th–4th centuries BC , and the c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD of ancient Greece and the ancient world; being predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek...

     block print dating to the 6th century BC

External links

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