The phrase "an ancient copy" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when referring to a reproduction or version of a document, artifact, or text that is very old.
Example: "The museum displayed an ancient copy of the manuscript, dating back to the 12th century."
Alternatives: "a historical replica" or "an old version".
Some German journalists had contributed a heavily highlighted "Animal Farm" and an ancient copy of "West Side Story".
A long time ago, lurking at the back of a forgotten cupboard, I found an ancient copy of William Thackeray's Vanity Fair.
I discovered Blackwood through an ancient copy of Tales of the Uncanny and Supernatural, which repackaged 22 of his short stories into a chunky volume that still casts a sinister shadow across the stairwell of my house.
I recently came across the recipe in an ancient copy of "The Memphis Cook Book," published by the city's Junior League, and figured out why it was so incredibly good.
Past the sandals left at the entrance and into the largest church, the Bet Medhane Alem, some worshipers leaned against pillars and read from their Bibles, others knelt on the cold carpeted stone floor, others still gathered in the sanctuary to listen to a young priest reading from an ancient copy of the New Testament.
Don't you have any other songs that we could copy for the cover?' I went directly to Colony and told my problem to the man at the counter, and he said, 'Wait a minute, I think I know just what you need.' He gave me 'I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen,' an ancient copy of it with the crease where it had been bent over for years, and he said, 'Tell RCA to take this one.' ".
He informed Erasmus that in the Vatican Library is held an extremely ancient copy of the Scriptures (i.e. Codex Vaticanus).
The phylogenetic analyses suggested that the high copy numbers for these elements are due to recent amplification of these elements a few ancient copies.
The pose is not original, being a reversal of the Apollo Belvedere, an ancient Roman copy of a mid-4th-century-bc Hellenistic statue Reynolds had seen in the Vatican.
Libr., Additional Manuscripts 43725; Gregory-Aland nº א [Aleph] or 01, [Soden δ 2]) or "Sinai Bible" is one of the four great uncial codices, an ancient, handwritten copy of the Greek Bible.
The different gene orders of SLGs and SRKs in known class-I and class-II S haplotypes and the inference that SLGs were derived from an ancient duplicated copy of SRK [ 1, 36, 44], support the notion that class-I and class-II SRKs might also be derived from two tandemly duplicated paralogous genes.
