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 might have actually been a student exercise book, in an attempt to explain the many differences to the standard Uthmanic text. However, leading Quranic manuscript expert Hythem Sidky refers to a paper by Nicolai Sinai for "criticism of her reading of the lower text and overall thesis"^[2] and to a paper by another Quranic manuscript expert, Éléonore Cellard, "for a codicological reconstruction of portions of the undertext demonstrating the document’s status as a codex and the product of professional scribes". ^[3]For these reasons Hilali's thesis is now widely considered to be completely untenable.