Two Leaves, and What the Carbon Actually Dated

In July 2015 the University of Birmingham announced that two parchment leaves in its Mingana Collection had been radiocarbon dated to between 568 and 645 CE, with 95.4 per cent probability, making them among the oldest Quranic material known. The leaves carry parts of surahs 18 to 20 in Hijazi, the sloping early Arabic book hand, with few diacritical marks and no vowel points. They had been in Birmingham since the 1920s, bound up with leaves of a different seventh-century Quran, and were separated only when Alba Fedeli, working on a doctorate about early Quranic manuscripts, noticed that the two hands did not match.

The reporting that followed frequently said something the science did not. Radiocarbon dates organic material, and what was dated here was the animal skin. The parchment cannot be younger than the writing that sits on it, so the result gives a genuine upper bound. It does not date the ink. Parchment could be prepared and stored, and skins were sometimes kept for years before use, so the writing may be appreciably later than the animal died. The honest form of the claim is that these leaves were written no earlier than the parchment was made and probably not very long after, which is still remarkable and is not the same as saying the text was written in 645.

The leaves have been exhibited in Birmingham and in Dubai since the announcement.