Tradition

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Manuscripts is the largest of the artifact groups in this taxonomy, and its members divide cleanly by what kind of question each one settles. Several are the most authoritative surviving copies of a scripture. The Aleppo Codex, copied in Tiberias around 920 to 930 CE and long consulted by Maimonides himself, is the most authoritative manuscript of the Masoretic Hebrew Bible, though it lost roughly two fifths of its leaves, most of the Torah among them, in the anti Jewish riots of 1947. Because of that loss, the Leningrad Codex, the oldest complete Hebrew Bible manuscript, dated by its own colophon to 1008 or 1009 CE and copied entirely by one scribe, now serves as the base text for standard critical editions instead. The Dead Sea Scrolls, some nine hundred to a thousand manuscripts found from 1947 onward near Qumran, include the oldest known copies of books of the Hebrew Bible alongside previously unknown hymns and a sectarian community's own rule books.

Others in the group settle a dispute rather than a text. The Salamander Letter, fabricated by Mark Hofmann around 1984 and briefly presented as genuine early Mormon testimony, was proven a forgery after Hofmann's own 1985 murders. The Maya Codex of Mexico surfaced through looters in the 1960s and was long condemned as a probable fake before a 2018 authentication study reversed that judgment. The Shapira Strips were condemned as forgeries in 1883, then lost, then re-argued as possibly genuine in a 2021 study, leaving their status one of the field's most striking open questions. And the Kartarpur Bir, revered as the original 1604 Adi Granth of Sikhism, remains privately held and rarely examined, so its identification with that founding volume is a matter of tradition scholarship has not confirmed for itself.