Sana'a Palimpsest

A palimpsest is a manuscript that has been scraped clean and used again, and it is valuable precisely because the scraping is never complete. Enough of the first text remains in the parchment to be recovered by instruments that can see what the eye cannot.

The upper text of this manuscript is unremarkable: a Quran that agrees closely with the standard consonantal text established under the caliph Uthman. The lower text is the reason the manuscript matters. It is also a Quran, and it is not that Quran. Its surahs come in a different order. Its wording differs at many points, sometimes in ways that change nothing and sometimes in ways that do not. It is the only physical witness anyone has found to a Quranic textual tradition standing outside the Uthmanic one.

Recovering it took decades and several technologies. The cache was found in 1972, the palimpsest identified in 1981, and the lower text read progressively through ultraviolet photography and then X-ray fluorescence imaging, with substantial publication only from the 2000s.

The manuscript therefore bears directly on how the Quran reached its standard form, and it does so as evidence rather than as argument. What it shows is that the standardisation described in the Islamic historical tradition left something behind, and that at least one copy of what was left behind survived because a later scribe needed the parchment.

In 1972 workmen repairing the Great Mosque of Sana'a after heavy rain opened a space between the ceiling and the roof and found it packed with parchment and paper. This was not a hidden library. Placing worn copies of the Quran somewhere they cannot be trodden on or destroyed is ordinary respectful disposal, and a mosque roof is a common place for it. What made this cache extraordinary was its age and its size: tens of thousands of fragments, some of them from the first century of Islam.

Conserving it took decades and outside help, principally a German-funded project from the late 1970s, which cleaned, flattened and catalogued the material and moved it to the Dar al-Makhtutat. In 1981 one manuscript was recognised as a palimpsest, and the work of recovering its lower layer began, running through ultraviolet photography and eventually X-ray fluorescence imaging as the technology arrived. Substantial publication of the readings did not begin until the 2000s, which is thirty years after the find.

A small number of folios of the same manuscript had left Yemen and are in private hands and other collections; one, now at Stanford, is the leaf that was radiocarbon dated. The condition of what remains in Sana'a has been a real concern since the Yemeni civil war, and the imaging done before it is now part of the record in its own right.