variant readings of the sana manuscripts

Furthermore, the analysis of the manuscript text compared with the literature of the Islamic tradition reveals a few qirā’āt that are substantiated through the manuscript itself. Lastly, the manuscript exhibits a few peculiar features as regards the subdivision of the Qur’ānic text into verses. These variants can be understood as a mirror of the linguistic competence of the copyist and his linguistic context, in that the manuscript bears some phonetic, orthographic, morphologic and syntactic variants, but also a few lexical variants, among which there are variants related to the voice and recipient of the message and some variants due to mechanical errors during the copying activity. In a detailed analysis of the Mingana 1572a and BnF Arabe 328(c) folios in combination, dubbed MS PaB in her thesis, Alba Fedeli summarised her findings: Ī comparison between the copy of MS PaB and the Medina muṣḥaf leads to a number of differences being identified. Subsequent ultraviolet testing of the leaves has confirmed no underwriting, and excludes the possibility of there being a palimpsest. Arabic script at the time tended to not write out the silent alif. The text is laid out in the format that was to become standard for complete Quran manuscripts, with chapter divisions indicated by a decorated line, and verse endings by intertextual clustered dots.Īlthough the Quran text witnessed in the two Birmingham leaves almost entirely conforms to the standard text, their orthography differs, in respect of the writing (or omission) of the silent alif (ألف). There are no diacritical marks to indicate short vowels, but consonants are occasionally differentiated with oblique dashes. The two surviving leaves were separated in the original codex by a number of missing folios containing the intervening verses of surahs 18 and 19. One two-page leaf contains verses 17–31 of Surah 18 ( Al-Kahf) while the other leaf the final eight verses 91–98 of Surah 19 ( Maryam) and the first 40 verses of Surah 20 ( Ta-Ha), all in their present day sequence and conforming to the standard text. The Birmingham leaves, now catalogued as Mingana 1572a, are folio size (343 mm by 258 mm at the widest point), and are written on both sides in a generously-scaled and legible script. The two leaves have been recognized as belonging with the 16 leaves catalogued as BnF Arabe 328(c) in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, now bound with the Codex Parisino-petropolitanus, and witness verses corresponding to a lacuna in that text. Description Close-up of part of folio 2 recto, showing chapter division and verse-end markings in Hijazi script The Mingana Collection, comprising over 3,000 documents, was collected by Alphonse Mingana over three trips to the Middle East in the 1920s and was funded by Edward Cadbury, a philanthropist and businessman of the Birmingham-based chocolate-manufacturing Cadbury family. Background The Bismillah as written on the Birmingham muṣḥaf manuscript, the oldest surviving copy of the Qur'an. The Cadbury Research Library has carried out multispectral analysis of the manuscript and XRF analysis of the inks. It was on display at the University of Birmingham in 2015 and then at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery until 5 August 2016. The leaves preserve parts of Surahs 19 (Maryam) to 20 (Taha). The manuscript is written in ink on parchment, using an Arabic Hejazi script and is still clearly legible. It is part of the Mingana Collection of Middle Eastern manuscripts, held by the university's Cadbury Research Library.

In 2015, the manuscript, which is held by the University of Birmingham, was radiocarbon dated to between 568 and 645 CE (in the Islamic calendar, between 56 BH and 25 AH).

The Birmingham Quran manuscript is a single sheet of parchment on which two leaves of an early Quranic manuscript or muṣḥaf have been written. Comparison of a 20th-century edition of the Quran (left) and the Birmingham Quran manuscript (right)

Variant readings of the sana manuscripts