World's Oldest Bookbinding

From "World's Oldest Book," by Ilana Herzig, in Archaeology, Jan/Feb 2024:

A 10-by-6-inch piece of papyrus is, researchers now believe, part of the world’s first book. And, like many of the volumes that fill offices, libraries, and homes, it has had many lives. The papyrus fragment, which was unearthed along with hundreds of other pieces of papyrus at the site of El Hibeh in 1902, began as a bound document dating to 260 B.C. that recorded taxation rates for beer and oil scrawled in Greek letters using black ink.

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The discovery pushes the origins of bookbinding back by centuries. “The oldest book previously known was from the first or second century A.D., so this predates anything by up to 400 years,” Zammit Lupi says. “The book could be indicative of how transactions happened, of how people lived, wrote, and passed information to each other. Most importantly, we learned that the structure of the book, as opposed to a scroll, existed well before we thought.”