August
14
/ 2016
The largest private collection of manuscripts is remarkable not just for the number of items it possesses (over 20,000) but for the breadth and depth of human history it encompasses. The Schøyen Collection, which is stored in both Oslo and London, contains documents dating as far back as 5,300 years ago; items in the collection represent 134 different countries and are written in 120 different languages. Specimens in the collection include “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, and many others” (The Schøyen Collection, 2016). The Schøyen Collection started accumulating around 1920 at a time when
