Ancient Manuscripts That Should Never Have Been Opened

chances are you've heard of The Voyage manuscript the mysterious book that seems to be written in an unknown language that nobody's ever been able to translate it features drawings of plants and animals that don't exist and nobody knows who made it I've done a video about it here it's super famous but it's not the only mysterious manuscript that's ever been found there's actually a lot of them in fact I got a lot of comments on that Voyage video requesting that I talk about some of them but yeah all around the world we've found documents that challenge what we think we know about history stir up controversy and sometimes just make no sense so today let's take a look at some of the most mysterious ancient manuscripts that have ever been found in my episode about the world's weirdest form of writing I talked about how we're in a bit of a language crisis I mean nine languages a year are stop being spoken worldwide it's so bad that they predict that by 2080 we'll be losing a language every two weeks and this is important because we we lose ideas that are specific to cultures when a language dies we lose records of time periods and people we lose stories that that were important to them at that time and could still have meaning in our lives today and then there are the languages that we come across from our past that we can't understand that um even though we found them its meaning is lost to us but what might be even weirder is when we find manuscripts or documents and languages we do understand where we can decipher the information in it but that information is weird weird or out of place or out of time or it's made in a way that we can't figure out by people who we don't know who they are now some of these I'm about to talk about are still being studied uh so we may find out that they're not for real at some point in the future but some of these have been studied thoroughly and are super legit which only brings up more questions so let's start our treasure hunt where else ancient Egypt in 1868 an Egyptian mummy made its way to the Museum of Zagreb in Croatia it was of an ordinary woman nobody of any royalty or a priest or anything like that but what was interesting was what she was wrapped in it was linen strips with writing on it which isn't that big a deal but it wasn't Egyptian hieroglyphic it actually was something unknown at the time about 20 years later the museum officials sent the rappings to Vienna and there the Austrian egyptologist Jacob CRA looked at them and he figured out what the language was it was actually Ausin yeah weirdly for some reason this mummy had been wrapped with strips from an at truscan linen book this was an incredible Discovery first of all because at truscan was not spoken in Egypt it was an early kind of Roman language but also no surviving examples of at truskin linen books had ever been found I meant to say at truskin not at there usually a linen book like this would have dissolved way over time but Egypt's area climate and the materials that were used to dry the mummy helped preserve it this wasn't just the first atesin linen text that was found completely intact it was also the longest at truskin text ever found the book was originally a sheet about 3.4 M long before it was torn into strips for bandages it contained 12 Columns of text written in black and red ink and it's thought that about 60% of the original text is still on there they also found Papyrus from the Egyptian Book of the Dead wrapping the mummy's body which could give us a clue as to who she was so we found this linen it's in at truscan we can read it what was this thing actually about well basically it was just a calendar about which rights and sacrifices should be done throughout the year there are certain Gods mentioned like nethuns who was an at truscan Water God related to the Roman god Neptune and some of the words and names in the text lead the experts to believe that it was composed near the modern day Italian city of perusia now the linen itself was dated to the 4th Century BCE but the writing is from much later like the word January is used as a start of a ritual year which means that it was probably written between 200 150 BCE meaning whoever wrote this found linen that was literally like 3 centuries old and then wrote stuff on it and then later it got ripped up and was used on a mummy this linen has had quite the journey like to me that's a huge mystery right there like who goes and finds 300y old linen and then writes on it this doesn't even make sense but then there's the obvious question of how did this you know linen with a tresen writing on it make its way to Egypt so so the theory is uh since the mummy was found in the in the city of Alexandria which is a port city it's a big trading Hub um one theory is that she was basically just wrapped in whatever material was available which again um we're going to bury this person Let's uh let's just let's just find that book over there just tear up that book and just wrap let's just do a papier-mâché around yeah that's one way to do it now if that's the case then it would just happen to have a truskin text on there and there's no connection between that and the Egyptian Book of the Dead stuff that was in there and there's not really any big mystery as to how it would have made its way to Alexandria like I said it was a port city there was a lot of trade there and there was plenty of seaf fairing trade that went on in the Mediterranean way way back when so that's one theory that they just found the book and wrapped her up in it because that's what was available another theory is that she was actually of a truscan ancestry so she was buried to the customs of her ancestral and adoptive cultures but either way it's a book that was found wrapped around a mummy and if that is not worthy of a spot on a list of mysterious manuscripts out of I don't know what is Here's a thought instead of being a traitor could Judas scariot have been Jesus's best friend according to the controversial Gospel of Judas that's exactly the situation written on Papyrus and dating to around the 2 Century ad it tells a story of Jesus asking Judas to betray him so that he can fulfill his prophecy and Rise To Heaven the Papyrus is actually what they call a codex that was translated from ancient Greek to the Coptic language around 300 ad it was discovered in the 1970s in a cave near elmina in Egypt and it just kind of got past along between Antiquities dealers before finally winding up in a safe deposit box on Long Island New York he wound up in the hands of Antiquities dealer frieder newberger chakos who bought the manuscript tried to sell it couldn't sell it and then shipped it to the meus foundation for Ancient Art in basil Switzerland in 2001 there the text was reconstructed and translated by Rudolph CER or caser sure it was a 66 page manuscript that not only contained The Gospel of Judas but also the first Apocalypse of James a letter from Peter to Phillip and a fragment of a text called The Book of alyes okay so this came out hundreds of years later it clearly wasn't the actual Judas who was the author of this text it was most likely written by a gnostic by the way a gnostic is someone who believes that salvation is achieved through knowledge instead of Faith um they also believe that the world's Creator is not perfect so the Gospel of Judas shows Judas as being Jesus's favorite disciple and he would actually give secret messages to Judas that he didn't tell the other disciples things like the creation of humans and angels and other Celestial beings and the nature of the Universe the text also includes conversations between Judas and Jesus in the week before Passover all of that's controversial but its biggest controversy by far is the idea that Jesus actually asked Judas to betray him because he wanted if somebody were to betray him he would want that to be his best friend rather than an enemy this of course challenges the roots of Christianity um some Scholars have even gone so far as describe it as fiction or heretical forgery it also offers up a different understanding of God which you know in a perfect world would be okay different different viewpoints in all we don't really live in that world so yeah the the the veracity of this document is still very much under debate uh obviously it's very old but how accurate it is as yet to be determined another Bible related manuscript is the messet Kellum or the tretis of the vessels it claims to reveal what happened to the Ark of the Covenant in King Solomon's Treasures I mean don't we know what happened to the Ark of the Covenant feel like I've seen that before it lists items like 200,000 talents of pearls 77 gold tablets from the walls of Eden 1,000 liars and 7,000 loots all these items were hidden in different locations before the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem and these locations are purposefully obscure but also kind of specific like in a tower or in the spring of zedekiah Professor James deila from St Andrew's University translated the text but its age authorship and origin are still uncertain there are also two different versions of this the first version was put into composite Hebrew volumes between the 17th and 20th centuries this version says that the treasures are stashed away around Babylon between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers the other version appears on two ancient plaques and it says that the treasures were stored in the Holy Land either way Dila believes that U both of these are basically fiction based on different Legends as he told Live Science in 2014 quote the writer draws on traditional methods of scriptural Exodus to deduce where the treasures might have been hidden but I think the writer was approaching the story as a piece of entertaining fiction not any kind of real guide for finding the Lost Temple Treasures there are also some similarities to The Copper Scroll which is one of the Dead Sea Scrolls dating back more than 1900 years for example both texts refer to vessels and include listings of gold so where do these documents say that the arch of the Covenant actually is um well of course it's mysterious uh in its own obscure way the text says that the location won't be revealed until quote the day of the coming of the Messiah son of David So if you're watching this and your name is David and you have a child um please chime in in the comments let us know if your child is the Messiah cuz uh then we might actually find out where this thing is in 1965 a team of looters Unearthed a few items in a cave in Mexico they found things like a wooden mask and a knife with a handle shaped like a fist sounds like some James Bond billain stuff they also found a manuscript but because they were looters they had trouble selling it because people didn't think it was authentic it was an 11-page manuscript on bark paper that included images of pre-colombian death Gods a calendar for tracking Venus in Mayan images and symbols it eventually found its way to a book collector named hos Sans I think I'm saying that right uh who had it displayed at the groer club in New York which is how it got its name the groer Codex now when I first read that I thought wow that's amazing and they found this at some dance club in New York no it's the groer club is a book club they have exhibitions of rare books and stuff like that so not as interesting of a story it's not as out of place there as it sounds but because it was found by lutter and because uh it kind of made its way to a book club where it was on exhibition and not quite you know in an academic sense uh it was still considered by many to be um inauthentic but in 2016 it was officially determined to be genuine a team of anthropologists archaeologists and cultural experts examined the document closely they looked at things like its content its physical structure and its style they used everything from ultraviolet Imaging to X-rays and microscopic analysis they even radiocarbon dated it to the 13th century so it's legit they were also able to prove that the pigments and ink in the manuscript contain no modern materials that they were consistent with pigments that were used in three other Maya Cotes in fact the blue pigment found on one of the pages is from Indigo die and something called P gorite I think I'm saying that right that's a clay mineral that Mayans used for their blue pigments and this material was only identified in 1964 and wasn't synthesized until the 1980s so yeah there's no way that the looters could have made that ink back in the' 60s there also images in the Codex of the forger in the 1960s wouldn't have known about like on one page uh there was a mountain God picture with a Clift in the center of his head that contains maze kernels now that wouldn't mean anything except that in 1974 a similar image was found on a wall painting so the forgers would have had to known about that wall painting before faking a book with that image in it and there's no way they could have done that as for what's in the groia Codex it's thought that it has information about Venus's role in Mayan astronomy and religion also its drawings are really gnarly and according to some places that I saw it's considered the oldest manuscript in North America today when we think of spells and incantations and stuff like that we think of witches and the dark arts it's kind of frowned upon it's got some you know Sinister motive to it but there was a time in the ancient world when you know incantations and spells weren't frowned upon at all because everybody believed in Magic and that's where the Coptic Handbook of ritual power comes into play it's also called the Egyptian Handbook of ritual power just amazing Name by the way but it was only deciphered recently in 2014 by two Australian researchers an antiques dealer sold it to mcquary University University in Australia in 1981 and yeah researchers took a look at it and they figured out that it's a handbook for rituals and spells some of the Spells include spells for love spells for curing black jaundice and instructions for performing an exorcism overall there are 20 pages of parchment offering 27 spells and several incantations and illustrations and at one time it may have actually been two documents that were combined into one later on Scholars are unsure of exactly where it was originally found but they believe that somebody wrote it in pre-islamic Upper Egypt around 1300 years ago there are several references says to Jesus and the sethians in the manuscript uh the sethians were religious groups who identified with Seth which is Adam and Eve's third son the groups also identified with a Godlike being named bacoa uh this figure opens up the Codex with these lines I give thanks to you and I call upon you the bacoa the great one who is very trustworthy the one who is Lord over the 40 and the nine kinds of serpents the translators think the person who wrote this was not a priest necessarily but maybe a scholar who was writing this as a way to help people achieve their goals like for example there are spells in in there to help someone do better in business or to get along with other people in a way you could say this was like the first self-help book but with magic and before we get to the last manuscript there are some honorable mentions we want to throw out there some other mysterious items that are worth checking out the colonial era Jamestown slate was found in an old well in Jamestown Virginia and has overlapping scratched inscriptions and drawings of a man dressed in a ruffle collar the lands of the pur rise map is a 1513 document that shows mountains in South America that were unknown at the time in a det deted Antarctica without ice even though it's been covered in ice for 6,000 years easter island has wood tablets that contain an undecipherable rango rango script that runs left to right and then right to left when turned upside down and then there's the feos disc which has 242 symbols that show things like an arrow a beehive a cat a tree and a tattooed head that may be phonetic groups but since there aren't that many of them they can't be deciphered if any of those sound interesting enough for its own video let me know down below now last but not least we have the book of soyga and according to 16th century scholar and Mystic John D the book of SOA was actually transcribed By Angels for Adam while he was in Eden it was a medium named Edward Kelly that told him this U even though D was a man of science he was also interested in the occult so of course it makes sense that the book of sorga was part of his Library it's a 200 Page book written in Latin and seems to be about Renaissance magical practices and beliefs uh now part of the book includes sections on astronomy the identification of specific Angels summoning demons and of course magic so de understood the Latin text but the book's 36 Pages were confusing to him because each page contains a square of 36 rows and 36 Columns of seemingly random Latin letters that's a total of 46,656 characters D couldn't decode it and that's why he asked the medium Edward Kelly for answers and he was told that only the Archangel Michael could translate it or if anybody did figure out how to translate that section they'd be cursed to die within two and a half years so you guys just stay away from it now the text itself does post some some problems like some of the the Latin words appear written backward for no apparent reason uh in fact the word SOA may actually be the reverse of agios which is a Greek word for sacred or holy the book was auctioned off in 1608 after d died and then was just basically lost for about 400 years but two copies were found in 1994 one in the British library in London and another in the bodland library at Oxford but then in 2006 mathematician and cryptologist Jim Reeds figured out that code not to get too In The Weeds about it but each table is based on a magic word of six letters this is the seed word and it's different on each page he discovered that the first 24 tables are named after constellations in the Zodiac two tables for each sign and then there are seven tables named after planes four after natural elements and one after the figure of Magister or master so even with the code correct we still don't really know what it all means now one theory is that it's a representation of the universe oh and remember that curse well Jim Reeds is still alive so but then again he only cracked the code he didn't figure out its meaning so the book of SOA is definitely ancient and it's definitely weird uh it's got a lot of mysteries around it but uh maybe maybe we'll figure out its meaning as time goes on so what do all of these mysterious codes and manuscripts have in common um outside of the fact that like we're just look we're humans we we love a good mystery we love making sense of the world and and and you know figuring out patterns and whatnot we're just wired that way but something that I always wonder whenever I run across these stories about like mysterious ancient documents and stuff like that was um how do we know they're not just people being creative because yes we we love a good mystery and we love solving Mysteries and whatnot but we're also creative people we're artists the very first things we did was put art on the walls of caves and stuff like that so how do we know that this isn't just people being creative you know like we tend to treat everything that's written in the past like it's some kind of pure document but most of what we write today is fiction or some kind of you know creative thing so who's to say that they weren't just making up stories back then like we do today like I've joked before that if people from the future applied the same logic to today as we ascribe to the Past then they might find a Harry Potter book and think that we all had magical powers so yeah what if these manuscripts and codes were just people having fun what if the book of Judas was a kind of fanfiction or alternative history exercise I like to consider that but there's also the other side of the coin which is that you know way back in in that time the ability to write was so rare and the process of creating documents was so labor intensive um it was probably unlikely that people would have gone through all that just on a goo but think people do some crazy stuff in the in the spirit of just being creative so who knows either way I find all of these just fascinating and I'm curious to see what else comes up these ancient documents might not ever fully be solved but the search is still worth doing these documents were how we shared information back in the day it was it was how we learned today of course we learn most things online from news sites social media handsome science communicators on YouTube and today's sponsor brilliant the 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Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 882,611

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott

Id: AajoxuTm9kc

Length: 19min 29sec (1169 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 11 2024