Giorgi Grdzelishvili, the head of the communications department of the ruling Georgian Dream party, announced that Bidzina Ivanishvili purchased a unique manuscript by John Zosimos at Christie’s auction, which will be donated to the National Museum.

“Another historic act of charity and a significant contribution to the world! Bidzina Ivanishvili bought a manuscript by John Zosimos from the Mount Sinai collection (5th-7th centuries) in Aramaic and Georgian at Christie’s auction for one million British Pounds. This unique manuscript will be donated to the National Museum!” Grdzelishvili wrote on social networks.

The auction featured a Georgian manuscript from the Mount Sinai collection, dating back to the 5th-7th centuries and written in Aramaic and Georgian. Part of the text was overwritten by the monk John Zosimos and valued between GBP 1,000,000 and GBP 1,500,000.

This manuscript is one of the most important fragments to have come to auction of Christian Palestinian Aramaic, a Western Aramaic dialect used by the Melkite Christian community in Palestine and Transjordan between the 5th and 13th centuries and preserved only in a few inscriptions, palimpsests and manuscripts.

The manuscript contains the earliest textual witnesses of the Gospels in the nearest dialect of Aramaic to that spoken by Jesus, composed within a living tradition based in the Holy Land.

The palimpsest is overwritten with Georgian text written by the famed calligrapher, author, translator and bookbinder-monk John Zosimos and survives here in his 10th-century binding from St. Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai, the earliest known signed, dated and localisable binding.