One of the oldest libraries in the world is Saint Catherine’s Monastery Library, which is located in Egypt at the foot of Mount Sinai. Second only to the Vatican, Saint Catherine’s contains the largest amount of manuscripts and codices for scholarly viewing. Located in a desolate part of the South Sinai peninsula, it has been isolated for centuries.

An extraordinary artifact has been key to the monastery’s preservation: the Ashtiname of Muhammad, by which the Islamic prophet is considered to have bestowed his protection upon the monastery.

The library also contains a historical treasure: the Codex Sinaiticus, which is a manuscript written in the 4th century that contains the entire New Testament, all of the Deuterocanonical books, the Epistle of Barnabas, and sections of The Shepherd of Hermas.