Thread by @CellardEleonore

1/11. A palimpsest is a writing surface from which the previous text has been erased in order to receive a new text above. Every handwritten culture knows it since early times. Often, economic reasons are implied. But not always.. Short insight into the Qur’ān scribal culture.

2/11. Unlike the other book cultures, reusing a non-virgin parchment for writing the Qur’ān is very rare, at least among the materials available to us. Of the hundreds of Qur’ān volumes written during the first Islamic centuries, only few are palimpsests.

3/11. Let us put aside the Mingana-Lewis palimpsest, kept in Cambridge, as some of its Qur’ān original leaves have been reused in a Christian milieu.

Pictures and careful reconstruction of the lower text by Alba Fedeli are available here: cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/mi…

4/11. Within the Qur’ān scribal milieu, 2 artifacts could indeed imply economic motivations. The Damascus Qur’ān palimpsest and the Copto-Qur’ān one reuse leaves from Greek and Coptic mss. The original leaf has been folded, in order to produce 2 leaves for the Qur’ān instead of 1

5/11. Two other palimpsests are known in the Qur’ān scribal culture. Both have been found in the Ṣan‘ā’ mosque. Their originality is that the 2 layers of script – the erased one and the new one – are both Qur’ānic. And also very important: the same format is maintained.

6/11. Can we talk about genuine palimpsests, which would mean that we’re dealing with 2 independent Qur’ān texts? Rather than a simple correction of one same text?

7/11. This issue is important as most of early Qur’ān mss keep traces of erasures. These are technically speaking cases of palimpsests. However, the textual change is limited to a word, some lines at the most. And these corrections are always complementary of the original text.

8/11. In Ṣan‘ā’, the situation is different. The most well-known palimpsest is the Codex Ṣan‘ā’ 1. 80 leaves are still preserved and they are of a great value for understanding this document.
Pictures of DAM 01-27.1 are available for downloading here: islamic-awareness.org/quran/text/mss…

9/11. The lower text has been deciphered on almost half of the folios. The 2 layers of script are clearly 2 independent Qur’ān texts, although both share the same layout.

10/11. The other, DAM 18-?.1, is known by one single picture from the UNESCO project. The textual sequences of the 2 layers aren’t complementary, but they aren’t so distant from each other.. So, extensive correction of the same text or independant text? the question remains open.

11/11. Palimpsests are known in Qur’ān scribal milieu. Sometimes, economy is implied. But this is definitely not the case for the Codex Ṣan‘ā’ 1. Among the other possible motivations : removing a text which diverges from the 'Uthmanic recension. That sounds reasonable to me.