1200 year old book found.....

ok, so this is big news...... Ireland’s National Museum said on Wednesday that a 1,200-year-old Book of Psalms found last week by a construction worker in a bog was so archaeologically significant that it could be called an “Irish equivalent to the Dead Sea Scrolls.”

Museum officials said it was remarkable both that the psalter had survived for so long in boggy terrain and that a construction worker had spotted it and halted a mechanical digger just in time to save it from destruction.

“In my wildest hopes, I could only have dreamed of a discovery as fragile and rare as this,” Patrick F. Wallace, the director of the National Museum in Dublin, said in a statement. “It testifies to the incredible richness of the early Christian civilization of this island.”

Aoife Demel, a spokeswoman for the museum, said in a telephone interview that several experts had examined the text and that there was no possibility that it was a hoax.

The museum said in a news release that “in discovery terms this Irish equivalent to the Dead Sea Scrolls is being hailed by the museum’s experts as the greatest find ever from a European bog.” The museum said it could not determine how the manuscript ended up in the bog. “It may have been lost in transit or dumped after a raid, possibly more than a thousand to twelve hundred years ago,” the news release said. Bernard Meehan, a manuscript expert at Trinity College, Dublin, said this was the first discovery of its kind in 200 years.

The manuscript, containing approximately 20 pages, was discovered last Thursday in the Irish Midlands when the construction worker noticed it while excavating for commercial potting soil. Museum officials declined to specify the bog’s location, explaining that archaeologists were still exploring the site.

The museum said that the bound pages had slipped outside the book’s wraparound cover, made of vellum or leather, and that the psalms were written directly on vellum and the book was found open at a page showing Psalm 83 in Latin.

In later English-language versions, Psalm 83 exhorts God to act against conspirator nations plotting to wipe out “the name of Israel.”

Raghnall O Floinn, who is in charge of collections at the museum, said each page of the document contained about 40 lines of script, with around 45 letters per line. “While part of Psalm 83 is legible, the extent to which other psalms or additional texts are preserved will only be determined by painstaking work by a team of invited experts, probably operating over a long time in the museum laboratory,” he said.

The estimated age of the manuscript would place it in the same early medieval period as the Book of Kells (circa A.D. 800), an illuminated manuscript of the Christian Gospels that is on public view in the Old Library at Trinity College, Dublin.