Three other Maya bark-paper manuscripts, dubbed the Dresden, Madrid and Paris
codices for where they're housed, were discovered and authenticated by the mid-1800s (SN: 2/21/15, p.
Features unique to the mobile app include a bookmarking tool for individual pages and the personal library space called My
Codices. The app also allows users to download entire manuscripts for offline use.
And according to the first and most important of its colophons--statements at the end of
codices providing information about who wrote and commissioned them, and to whom they were given--it was commissioned by a rich Karaite and written in 894 CE by Moshe ben Asher, Aaron's father, making it the earliest known Hebrew manuscript.
The Coptic Gnostic Library includes not only the Nag Hammadi tractates, but also the contents of three additional
codices, the Papyrus Berolinensis 8502, the Askew codex, and the Bruce codex, all known prior to 1945.
In 1929, local workmen digging for fertilizer in the ruins of an ancient house in Medinet Madi in Egypt discovered a cache of papyrus
codices still with their wooden covers in a chest.
In a completely separate development,
codices also were made by pre-Columbian peoples of Mesoamerica after about AD 1000.
The manuscript eventually moved to the collection of Purchas' friend, the jurist and antiquary John Selden (who already owned two other Mexican pictorial documents), and after his death all three
codices entered the Bodleian library, where they finally came to rest.
