The Sana'a Palimpsest: The Qur'an Beneath the Qur'an

In 1972 heavy rain brought down part of the Great Mosque of Sana'a, one of the oldest mosques in Yemen. Restorers working between the ceiling and the roof found a mass of old parchment and paper: thousands of fragments of worn-out Qur'an copies. They had been put there because a damaged copy of the Qur'an is not thrown away. From the 1980s a Yemeni–German project led by scholars including Gerd-R. Puin sorted and photographed the fragments. In 1981 one group of leaves was recognised as a palimpsest, a manuscript written over an earlier text that had been scraped or washed away. Under a Qur'an there was another Qur'an.

Two texts on one parchment

• Ṣanʿāʾ 1, as scholars call it, has about 80 leaves in Sana'a, plus four leaves that left Yemen and were sold at auction in the West.
• The upper text is a Qur'an that follows the standard ʿUthmānic text and the standard order of suras.
• The lower text, the one erased, is also a Qur'an. It is not the standard text. Its wording often differs in small ways: different words, word order, extra or missing phrases. Its suras run in an order found in no known tradition, although the suras themselves are recognisably the same ones.
• A radiocarbon test on one of the detached leaves, published by Behnam Sadeghi and Uwe Bergmann in 2010, dated its parchment, and so its lower text, to 578–669 CE at 95% probability. They reported a high probability of a date before about 646.

What scholars make of it

In 2012 Sadeghi and Mohsen Goudarzi published an edition of much of the lower text. They called it "at present the most important document for the history of the Qur'an" and argued that it is the only surviving copy of a textual tradition other than the ʿUthmānic. They linked it to the kind of Companion codices that Islamic sources say existed before ʿUthmān standardised the text, such as those attributed to Ibn Masʿūd and Ubayy ibn Kaʿb, while noting that it matches neither exactly.

Asma Hilali (2017, Oxford University Press / Institute of Ismaili Studies) published a new edition of both layers. She stressed signs that the lower text may have been a working or teaching copy rather than a finished codex. Éléonore Cellard (2021) studied how the leaves were made and assembled, and argued that the lower text was once part of a complete Qur'an codex. These readings are argued in the specialist literature and not settled.

Why erase a Qur'an?

Parchment was expensive, and reusing it was common in the ancient and medieval world. Christian scribes did the same: St Catherine's Monastery, the home of the Codex Sinaiticus (V18), also yielded the famous Syriac Sinaiticus, a Gospel text under a later one. Scribes may have erased the lower text because it no longer matched the standard text that had become authoritative. They may simply have needed the parchment. The manuscript itself does not tell us which.

Symbology and sacred encoding

Layers as history. A palimpsest is a physical record of change: one text, then another. Here the change runs from a non-standard to the standard text, the direction Islamic tradition describes when it tells of ʿUthmān's recension and the retirement of other copies.

The paper grave. Worn copies of the Qur'an are not discarded. They are buried, placed in a genizah-like store, or, as at Sana'a, set aside inside a mosque. The Jewish practice of the Cairo Genizah preserved texts in a similar way.

Reading instructions. Imaging has revealed small marks in the lower text that may be early reading or recitation instructions. They point to the Qur'an as a text that is recited, of which the written copy is only one part.

Connections

Islam (ch21), the Birmingham Qur'an (V28), and the Codex Sinaiticus (V18), another manuscript whose layers and corrections have been read as a history of its text.

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/sanaa-palimpsest.html