The Mingana Collection of Middle Eastern Manuscripts

This is the Cadbury Research Library at the University of Birmingham's own institutional record for its Mingana Collection of Middle Eastern manuscripts, assembled in the early twentieth century by the Chaldean priest and scholar Alphonse Mingana and including the parchment leaf whose radiocarbon dating in 2015 identified it as among the oldest surviving fragments of a Quran manuscript anywhere. Its strength is that a holding institution's own record is authoritative for exactly this kind of provenance and custody fact, including the details of the collection's formation and its later scientific dating. Its limit is that it documents holding and provenance rather than offering independent scholarly interpretation of the manuscripts' textual content or their place in the history of Quranic transmission, a question needing the specialist codicological literature the dating result itself generated rather than the library's own institutional page.