TV Documentary Shows Investigations into the ‘Mummy Book’
16 January 2025

Photo: ORF
A TV documentary spotlights the spectacular case of the ‘Mummy Book’ – the supposedly oldest codex fragment in the world, found in Graz in 2023. It also shows the investigations of the object at the CSMC, which play a crucial role in clarifying the open questions surrounding the ‘Mummy Book’.
In the summer of 2023, a find in the University Library of Graz caused a sensation: During routine work on the Egyptian papyri in the special collection, paper conservator Theresa Zammit Lupi came across an object that exhibited various characteristics of a codex fragment: a central fold, holes from stitching and remnants of a thread – just like a sheet in a bound book. What is sensational about it is that this object dates from the 3rd century BCE. This makes it around 400 years older than the oldest codex fragments known to date. While it was previously assumed that this form of book was only developed in late antiquity, the Graz find might show that the history of the book needs to be rewritten and its beginning considerably predated. Accordingly, interest among experts and media coverage was considerable.
But is the ‘Graz Mummy Book’ – the object owes its catchy name to its use as cartonnage for a mummy – actually the remains of a codex or does it only coincidentally show some features that suggest this? Experts have been discussing this controversially for a year and a half now. To get closer to an answer to this question, researchers from Graz brought the Mummy Book to Hamburg in late summer 2024, where it was examined in detail using various analytical methods available at the CSMC’s Artefact Lab. For this purpose, the famous object was removed from its glass enclosure, which protects it in the collection, for the first time in decades.
The Austrian public broadcaster ORF recently aired an extensive documentary about the Graz Mummy Book, which can also be accessed in the ORF’s media library. It also features the analyses in Hamburg and interviews with the researchers from the Artefact Lab. ‘Some holes in the document are clearly man-made,’ says Claudia Colini, head of the Artefact Lab. ‘We can also confirm that the document was folded. What we cannot yet confirm is the theory of how the document was folded and the direction of the sewing.’
One thing is clear: The Graz Mummy Book will continue to keep experts and the public in suspense.