Ten Incredible Text From Our Ancient Past

1. #TheDunhuangManuscripts The Dunhuang Manuscripts are a cache of around 20,000 important scrolls found in the Mogao Caves of Dunhuang. The Dunhuang manuscripts date to between the 5th and 11th centuries A.D., and were sealed up in a chamber in a cave, hidden for about 900 years. Although the Dunhuang Manuscripts contain mostly Buddhist texts, there were other forms of sacred texts as well. These include Taoist, Nestorian Christian, and Manichaean texts.

2. #TheKangyurWritten with 9 Precious Stones Tibetans practised a form of Shamanism called Bon. From the 6th to 8th centuries A.D., Buddhism slowly penetrated this mountainous region. The teachings of the Buddha were translated into Tibetan, but its final compilation was only achieved in the 14th century.

3. #TheLegendaryEmeraldTablet The Emerald Tablet is said to be a tablet of emerald or green stone inscribed with the secrets of the universe. The source of the original Emerald Tablet is unclear, hence it is surrounded by legends. The most common legend claims that the tablet was found in a caved tomb under the statue of Hermes in Tyana, clutched in the hands of the corpse of Hermes Trismegistus himself.

4. #TheEgyptianDreamBook The Egyptian 'Dream Book' is preserved in the form of a papyrus with a hieratic script. This papyrus was found in the ancient Egyptian workers' village of Deir el-Medina, near the Valley of the Kings. This papyrus has been dated to the early reign of Ramesses  (1279-1213 B.C.). Each page of the papyrus begins with a vertical column of hieratic signs which translates as 'If a man sees himself in a dream'.

5. #TheCopperScroll The Copper Scroll is part of the extraordinary cache of 1st Century documents first discovered in caves at Qumran, popularly known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Copper Scroll, however, is very different from the other documents in the Qumran library. In fact, it is so anomalous among the Dead Sea Scrolls - its author, script, style, language, genre, content, and medium all differ to the other scrolls - that scholars believe it must have been placed in the cave at a different time to the rest of the ancient documents.

6. #TheSumerianKingList Out of the many incredible artefacts that have been recovered from sites in Iraq where flourishing Sumerian cities once stood, few have been more intriguing that the Sumerian King List, an ancient manuscript originally recorded in the Sumerian language, listing kings of Sumer (ancient southern Iraq) from Sumerian and neighbouring dynasties, their supposed reign lengths, and the locations of "official" kingship.

7. #Ancientbamboomedicalbooks of legendary Bian Que In 2013, archaeologists unearthed 920 bamboo strips within four Western Han Dynasty ( 206 BC - 24 AD) tombs located in the town of Tianhui in the south-western city of Chengdu in China, containing recipes for treating ailments that date back 2,000 years. Analyses of the texts revealed that some of them were written by the legendary Bian Que, China's earliest known physician. Translation work has also revealed the remarkable contents of these ancient medical manuscripts.

8. #Hammurabi'sCodeofLaws Hammurabi's Code of Laws is one of the most famous collections of laws from the ancient world. Hammurabi (reigned from 1792-1750 B.C.) was the sixth ruler of the First Dynasty of Babylon. During his long reign, he oversaw the great expansion of his empire, and made Babylon a major power in Mesopotamia. By the time of Hammurabi's death, Babylon was in control of the whole of Mesopotamia, although his successors were not able to maintain this control.

9. #TheTakenouchiManuscripts The Takenouchi manuscripts are a set of mysterious documents that were rewritten by a man named Takenouchino Matori 1,500 years ago in a mixture of Japanese and Chinese characters, transcribed from even older texts. According to legend, the original documents were written in divine characters many millennia ago by 'the gods'. The unusual texts tell a story of humanity in a way that has never been told before, starting from the beginning of creation up until the emergence of Christianity.

10. #TheancienttextsofTimbuktu Located at the gateway to the Sahara desert in what is now Mali, within the confines of the fertile zone of the Sudan, Timbuktu is one of the cities of Africa whose name is the most heavily charged with history.