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The Qur’āns of the Great Mosque, Ṣan‘ā’
1/9. 1965 : heavy rains damaged the roof of the west side of the Great Mosque. Assessing the damage, the Yemeni found « parchment leaves written in kufic », and extracted a part of the hoard.. 5 bags or more full of leaves…
The Qur’āns of the Great Mosque, Ṣan‘ā’
1/9. 1965 : heavy rains damaged the roof of the west side of the Great Mosque. Assessing the damage, the Yemeni found « parchment leaves written in kufic », and extracted a part of the hoard.. 5 bags or more full of leaves…
2/9. Stored in the Awqāf Library, the leaves were not safe from looting and several of them began to circulate on the antiquities trade.
3/9. In 1973, restoration work in the same area revealed other thousands of mss (+ printed docs). According to Costa, it was a recent storage, after a restoration and a reordering of the library. Stocked in 20 potatoes bags, these leaves were transferred to the National Museum
4/9. In 1980, the German Government and Yemeni authorities established a project to preserve, store, catalogue and microfilm the mss. Back to the mosque, in Dār al-maḫṭūṭāt, more than half of the 15.000 estimated sheets of parchment, have been treated.
5/9. How many Qur’an mss on parchment ? The number fluctuates between 700 and 1000 according to the authors. No complete mss, but a number of cases keep a substantial part of the text. Most of them are in « kufic » script, and several are in hijazi.
6/9. Some 300 Qur’an leaves have been photographied by the UNESCO.
Available here : archive.org/details/SanaMa…
Available here : archive.org/details/SanaMa…
7/9. Among the most exceptional manuscripts : A fragment of a huge Umayyad muṣḥaf, with a fine quality of ornaments. Its initial folios keep 2 drawings of buildings, identified as the Damascus mosque and Medina mosque
8/9. The « Ṣan‘ā’ palimpsest » keeps an erased Qur’an text, with substantial variants beside the ‘Uṯmānic text and another arrangement of the sūras. Its nature – muṣḥaf with textual tradition inherited from a Companion or notebook used for study – is still discussed today.
9/9. Future investigations on the other early Qur’āns from Ṣan‘ā’ will help in our understanding of this document. Besides similarities in script and materiality, other muṣḥafs could attest as well to a different order of the sūras.
