Psalter, in Sahidic dialect of Coptic, in Coptic Uncials, manuscript on parchment, single leaf with a stub from its sister leaf on the other half of the bifolium, with remains of a single column of 27 lines of elegant Coptic Uncials set on unusually long lines, text partly indented ‘per cola et commata’, losses to upper and outermost edges (with damage to a few lines of text at head), stains in places, set in modern conservation paper, 200 x 160mm., [Upper Egypt (probably the White Monastery, Sohag)], [first half of fifth century].

⁂ Text and script: From an early Coptic Psalter, and containing Psalms 77:25-34 in the Sahidic dialect of Upper Egypt, translated in the third or even late second century (see E.A. Wallis Budge, The Earliest Known Coptic Psalter, 1898, and P. Nagel, ‘Der sahidische Psalter’, Der Septuaginta-Psalter, ed. Aejmelaeus and Quast, 2000, pp.82-96). The script here is a fine Coptic Uncial, derived from Greek Uncial, and showing its ultimate debt to Ancient epigraphic letter forms in its monumental and rounded majuscules and absence of spacing between words.

Provenance: 1. Most probably produced for use in the White Monastery (or the Monastery of St. Shenouda), Deir el-Abiad, near Sohag, Egypt, a Coptic Orthodox monastery near the Upper Egyptian city of Sohag. It was founded by St. Pigol in 442, and grew substantially in importance after his nephew St. Shenouda the Archimandrite (d.466) took over in 385. A prolific writer, he launched a literacy campaign within the monastery, producing a large library and establishing the house as perhaps the most important in the Coptic Church. When the first European visitors reached the monastery, the library was housed in a room to the north of the central apse called the ‘Secret Chamber’, which could be entered only through a hidden passage.

2. Maurice Nahman (1868-1948), French collector-dealer, and Head Cashier at the Cre?dit Foncier d’Egypte in Cairo, who used this position to establish himself as the foremost antiquity dealer of Cairo in the 1920s and 1930s. A sale of part of his collection was held by Christie’s, London, on 2 March 1937. After his death his son kept the business going until 1953, and then the remaining stock was offered in Hotel Drouot, Paris, in 26-27 February and 5 June 1953, with the remainder apparently passing to Erik von Scherling.

3. Re-emerging in Sotheby’s, 5 December 1995, lot 28.

4. Schøyen Collection, London and Oslo, their MS 114/25, acquired in Sotheby’s.

5. Bloomsbury Auctions, A Selection from The Schøyen Collection, 8 July 2020, lot 11, sold for £8000.