Dar al-Makhtutat (House of Manuscripts)

In 1971 heavy rain brought down part of the western wall of the Great Mosque of Sana'a, and repair work the following year opened a space between the ceiling and the roof packed with parchment and paper. The material had been placed there rather than destroyed, which is the usual respectful disposal for a worn Quran. Estimates of what came out run to twelve or fifteen thousand parchment fragments, from close to a thousand different manuscript volumes, most of them of the seventh to the eleventh centuries.

For years the fragments sat in storage. A conservation project funded by the German government and run with the Yemeni antiquities authorities began in 1980, and Ursula Dreibholz worked as its conservator in Sana'a from 1982 to the end of 1989. The decision that shaped everything after it was to treat the material in Yemen rather than send it abroad. That meant building the facilities and training the staff on site, and one Yemeni conservator, Abd al-Wahid al-Shami, was trained in German libraries for the purpose.

The House of Manuscripts, in the old city opposite the mosque, is what that project left behind: conservation and photographic workrooms, storage designed around the fragments using flat housing in the traditional Islamic manner in acid free materials, and a room where a selection of the leaves can be seen. The treatment was deliberately conservative, cleaning, humidifying and flattening rather than anything irreversible.

In 1981 one manuscript in the Sana'a cache was identified as a palimpsest: a parchment scraped clean and written over, with an earlier text still faintly present underneath. Recovering the lower layer needed ultraviolet imaging and later X-ray fluorescence, and the results were published only from the 2000s onward.

What the lower text shows is why the shelfmark DAM 01-27.1 is known well outside Yemen. It preserves a Quranic text that differs from the standard one in word order, in the presence and absence of phrases, and occasionally in wording, which makes it the only substantial witness anybody has to a textual tradition beside the Uthmanic one. It is a witness to variation rather than a rival scripture, and the scholarship that reads it is careful about the difference.

Two things complicate the custody. A small number of folios from the same manuscript had left Yemen before or during the conservation years and are in private hands and other collections, including one leaf at Stanford, which is the folio that was radiocarbon dated. And the condition of the material still held in Sana'a has been a concern since the Yemeni civil war began, for the ordinary reason that a conservation store needs power, climate control and staff to remain a conservation store. What the atlas can state is what is known to be held, where it is, and where the gaps in that knowledge begin.