Found in caves
In 1947 Bedouin shepherds searching for a lost goat near Qumran, by the Dead Sea, found clay jars in a cave holding ancient SCROLL fragments. Over the next decade eleven caves gave up the remains of around 900 manuscripts, including parts of every book of the Hebrew Bible except Esther. Some were about a thousand years older than the oldest copies scholars had before.
Another cave, at Dunhuang in western China, had been sealed around the year 1000 and was found again in 1900. Among thousands of documents inside was a printed copy of the Diamond SUTRA, a Buddhist teaching, dated to the year 868. It is the oldest dated printed book in the world, nearly six centuries older than Gutenberg's BIBLE.
Chapter and verse were added later
The books of the Bible were not written with numbered sections. The CHAPTER divisions used today are usually credited to Stephen Langton, later Archbishop of Canterbury, in the early 1200s. The numbered VERSE came in 1551 from the French printer Robert Estienne — his son later said he worked on it during a journey, which some scholars think explains a few oddly placed breaks.
Other scriptures carry their own structure. The Jewish TANAKH takes its name from its three parts, the TORAH, the Prophets and the Writings, whose Hebrew initials give T, N and K. The PSALMS, 150 of them, were the hymn book of the Temple. TESTAMENT means covenant, so the Old and New Testaments are named after two agreements between God and people.
Revealed words and remembered words
Many faiths distinguish between scripture believed to come directly from God or ultimate truth and writings that explain or collect it. Hindus call the VEDAS shruti, meaning what was heard, and texts such as the Bhagavad GITA smriti, what was remembered; the Gita is a 700-verse conversation between the god Krishna and the warrior Arjuna, set on a battlefield just before a war. Muslims hold the QURAN as the word of God, and the HADITH as reports of what the Prophet Muhammad said and did, each checked by tracing its chain of reporters back to him.
The Buddhist TRIPITAKA means three baskets, and was written down on palm leaves in Sri Lanka in the first century BC after centuries of being learned by heart. The AVESTA is the SACRED book of Zoroastrianism, one of the world's oldest surviving faiths, founded in ancient Iran and kept alive today by communities including the Parsis of India; the singer Freddie Mercury was born into one.
What happens to a worn-out holy book
Because they are HOLY, scriptures are often kept wrapped, placed on a stand rather than the floor, and handled with clean hands. When a Jewish text containing God's name wears out, it is not thrown away but stored in a genizah and later buried. The genizah of a synagogue in Old Cairo, emptied in 1896, held around 300,000 manuscript fragments collected over a thousand years, the largest share of them now at Cambridge University.
Worn copies of the Quran are usually buried or placed in running water, and an old Guru GRANTH Sahib is cremated with ceremony. Much of the most beautiful handwriting in history grew up around copying scripture — the GOSPEL books of Ireland, Qurans in flowing Arabic script — and our calligraphy page covers the craft. The TALMUD, the ANALECTS and every other SCRIPTURE in the grid has its own long history of being copied by hand.