Sana'a Manuscript: Difference between revisions

The Sana'a manuscript or Sana'a palimpsest, dubbed Ṣanʿā’ 1 or DAM 01-27.1, is one of the oldest copies of the Quran in existence. It was found in 1972 in the loft of the grand mosque of Sana'a, Yemen, along with many other old manuscripts. A palimpsest is a parchment whose original text has been scraped clean so that it can be reused. After some centuries, a faint trace of the underlying text can sometimes resurface due to metals in the ink. The lower text of the Sana'a palimpsest, which was subsequently overwritten with the standard Uthmanic Quran, is dated to the 7th Century CE and has many variations from that later standard in terms of individual words and phrases. 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_Qur%27an#Disagreements_on_the_Qur.27an|Textual History of the Quran]] for a discussion about how Muslim scholars explain the existence of such variants and the responses of critics.