Sana'a Manuscript

The Sana'a manuscript or Sana'a palimpsest, dubbed Ṣanʿā’ 1, is one of the oldest copies of the Quran in existence. Its lower text, subsequently overwritten, is dated to the 7th Century CE and has many variations from the standard Qur'an. It is the only known surviving example of a Quran manuscript that is not of the Uthmanic text type. It is considered to be a physical exemplar of the kinds of relatively substantial variations reported of the readings and codices of Muhammad's companions before such variety was constrained under Uthman around 650 CE. See the article Textual History of the Quran for a discussion about how Muslim scholars explain the existence of such variants and the responses of critics.

This table lists some of the variants in the lower text, as described in a lenghty paper by Behnam Sadeghi and Mohsen Goudarzi who have studied the manuscript folios in detail to reconstruct and analyse it.^[1] Asma Hilali has argued that the lower text of the palimpsest was actually a kind of student scrap book, in an attempt to explain the many differences to the standard Uthmanic text. While her theory was already widely rejected by scholars such an Marijn van Putten and Hythem Sidky, it is now considered completely untenable by the work of manuscript expert Éléonore Cellard, who has proven that it formed a complete codex.^[2]