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World's Oldest Torah Found at World's Oldest University
(Telegraph-UK) Nick Squires - The world's oldest Torah, the holy book of the Jewish faith, has been discovered in the archives of Bologna University, which was founded in 1088. The scroll, written in Hebrew, is 118 ft. long and 25 inches wide and consists of the first five books of the Jewish Bible. It had been wrongly dated to the 17th century by a librarian who studied it in 1889, but it now transpires that it is more than 800 years old. Leading experts "all agreed that it dated to the 12th or 13th centuries. One scholar believed it could even date back to the 11th century," said Mauro Perani, the university's professor of Hebrew who made the discovery. Carbon dating tests dated the text to between 1155 and 1225.