Ancient Manuscripts That Should Never Have Been Opened

From the oldest manuscript ever found in the Americas to a document wrapping an Egyptian mummy - and printed in the wrong language - here are some of the most mind-blowing and unexplainable ancient manuscripts ever found.

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TIMESTAMPS
0:00 - Intro
1:42 - Linen Book of Zagreb
7:17 - Massekhet Kelim
9:09 - The Grolier Codex
11:30 - The Coptic Handbook of Ritual Power
13:55 - Book of Soyga
17:39 - Sponsor - Brilliant

[Beldizar]

3:50 My wife has been doing research on historical textiles, and the answer to your question "who finds 300 year old linen and writes on it" the answer is pretty much everyone at the time. Textiles were very expensive and hard to make, so they got reused and repurposed over and over again. There's an altar cloth form a Catholic church in Spain that was once a Islamic battle standard, and had a couple other lives besides those two.

[RagingGoldenEagle]

Imagine future archaeologists finding a copy of my D&D 3.5 monster manual and being extremely confused.

[cannibalbananas]

I vote for a part 2 where you go over the honorable mentions, please and thank you, Joe

[ShaunSommer]

I love the ancient map that shows Antarctica, I would love a full video on that.

[Gzeebo]

Um, actually. Etruscan wasn't an early kinda Roman language. It was it's own thing. A bit of a mystery, but linguists don't think it's related to Latin, or any other Indo-European language. However, the Romans did borrow a bunch of words, cultural practices, and second-hand Greek stuff from the Etruscans, before nicking a bunch of Greek stuff directly later on.
By the way, is anyone else annoyed about the distinct lack of conveniently located caves where you can stash random stuff for people to find after thousands of years and wonder what it means?

[rustyfox]

The mummy wrapped in Etruscan texts reminds me of fish and chips wrapped in a random newspaper !

[CLaw-tbgg]

Joe, can I just say you're one of my favourite people on the Internet. There's so much negativity on the Internet, and you're just this endless beacon of wonder and positivity. Please never stop being you.

[ToolsAreToys]

My name is David but my 1 year old son is currently eating one of his own socks. I doubt he is the messiah, but i'll keep y'all updated.

[christopherhall]

It's hard to imagine ancient people writing weird things and leaving them in random places to confuse archeologists, because they probably never thought there would be other civilizations after theirs.

[DavidOliveriMcGovern]

1000 years from now they’ll believe we worshipped Star Wars as our mythology

[jcortese]

There's a pen-and-ink artist on YouTube with a ton of subscribers called "Peter Draws" who has filled a vast number of notebooks with years worth of incredibly oddball and beautiful ink drawings, even including strange-looking scripts that mean absolutely nothing. Someday some archaeologist is going to find them, and people will get PhDs trying to decode them.

[thisguy]

Uh, yes to the honorable mentions, or at least that one with a detailed map of Antarctica???? Like, what?

[lennsisson]

Regarding what you said about future people applying the same criteria we apply to the past to our present, I’d suggest reading “The Motel of the Mysteries, ” a graphic novel about future archaeologists discovering a motel. Note: the scene with the archaeologist walking about the dig site with a toilet seat around her neck and tooth brushes for ear rings, to show how these sacred artifacts were worn is beyond funny.

[Zengotim]

Imagine future archaeologists finding fish wrapped in newspaper and trying to figure that shit out.

[popcornfueralle]

I love how he sometimes delivers the most mindblowing stuff while talking in the most nonchalant manner ever heard by humankind

[joshk.]

Joe's right about the Ark of the Covenant.
I think a lot of us saw that old documentary Han Solo did about it.

[MarylandFarmer.]

The amount of times I think of burying weird stuff to confuse future people does make me think that past people would have thought to troll us as well.

[owenpancoast]

My browsing history should’ve never been opened

[simplethings]

The 3 step rule for determining veracity.
1. Are the materials authentic?
2. Does it appear to be contemporary for the time?
3. Does it confirm what I already believe?

[xuedi]

woman strolling through a flea market in from of the library of Alexandria buying some randoms books that are thrown out by the library for clean up, thought the fancy characters looked "cool" so she bought it and decorated here bedroom for years, then she died the family thought, hey, she loved that strange book so much, lets wrap her into that ... that how imagine it happend