146 year ago today, Aleph was found.
Aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. It is also the symbol used to designate Codex Sinaiticus, which is the Aleph found in 1859.
Codes Sinaiticus is a fourth-century uncial manuscript of the entire Greek New Testament (as well as parts of the Old Testament and other works).
(An uncial manuscript is one written in all capital letters, which is basically what all manuscripts were before the invention of lower-case letters.)
Codex Sinaiticus is one of the two most important manuscripts in New Testament textual criticism (the study of which variants in New Testament manuscripts were most likely in the original–now lost–documents). The other most important manuscript is Codex Vaticanus.
Sinaiticus was found by Constantin von Tischendorf in a monastery (the Monastery of St. Catherine) at the ostensible site of Mt. Sinai (hence the name) in Egypt.
The text to the left is taken from Codex Sinaiticus.
(Incidentally, a codex is the modern form of a book that we use today, with pages attached to a spine, rather than the older form of book with pages dewn end-to-end, making a scroll. Christians popularized the codex or modern book.)
Codex Sinaiticus helped revolutionize the study of the textual history of the New Testament.

