Sanaa manuscript
The Sanaa palimpsest or Sanaa Quran is one of the oldest Quranic manuscripts in existence and is important for textual criticism in Quranic studies. Part of a sizable cache of Quranic and non-Quranic fragments discovered in Yemen during a 1972 restoration of the Great Mosque of Sanaa, the manuscript was identified as a palimpsest Quran in 1981 as it is written on parchment and comprises two layers of text.
- The upper text entirely conforms to the standard Uthmanic Quran in text and in the standard order of surahs.
- The lower text, which was erased and written over by the upper text, but can still be read with the help of ultraviolet light and computer processing, contains many variations from the standard text. The sequence of its chapters corresponds to no known Quranic order.
History
Discovery
In 1972, construction workers renovating a wall in the attic of the Great Mosque of Sanaa in the Yemen Arab Republic came across large quantities of old manuscripts and parchments, many of which were deteriorated. Not realizing their significance, the workers gathered up the documents, packed them away into some twenty potato sacks, and left them on the staircase of one of the mosque's minarets.Isma'il al-Akwa' bin Ali, then the president of the Yemeni Antiquities Authority, realized the potential importance of the find. Al-Akwa' sought international assistance in examining and preserving the fragments, and in 1979 managed to interest a visiting German scholar, who in turn persuaded the West German government to organize and fund a restoration project. The preserved fragments comprise Quranic and non-Quranic material.
Restoration project
Restoration of the fragments began in 1980 under the supervision of the Yemeni Department for Antiquities. It was funded by the Cultural Section of the German Foreign Ministry. The find includes 12,000 Quranic parchment fragments. All of them, except 1500–2000 fragments, were assigned to 926 distinct Quranic manuscripts as of 1997. None is complete and many contain only a few folios apiece. Albrecht Noth was the director of the project. Work on the ground began in 1981 and continued through the end of 1989, when the project terminated with the end of funding. Gerd R. Puin was the director beginning with 1981. His involvement came to an end in 1985, when Hans-Caspar Graf von Bothmer took over as the local director. Bothmer left Ṣan'ā' in the following year, but continued to run the project from Germany, traveling to the site almost every year.Beginning in 1982, Ursula Dreibholz served as the conservator for this project, and worked full-time in Ṣan'ā' until the end of 1989. She completed the restoration of the manuscripts. She also designed the permanent storage, collated many parchment fragments to identify distinct Quranic manuscripts, and directed the Yemeni staff in the same task. The manuscripts are located in the House of Manuscripts, the Dār al-Makhṭūṭāt, in Ṣan'ā', Yemen. After 1989, Bothmer would visit the collection periodically. In the winter of 1996–97, he microfilmed all of the parchment fragments that have been assigned to distinct Quranic manuscripts. Of the remaining 1500–2000 fragments, he microfilmed a group of 280. The microfilms are available in Ṣan'ā' in the House of Manuscripts. A selection of 651 images of fragments from the Sana'a cache - including several from DAM 01-27.1, has been issued on a CD-ROM through the UNESCO 'Memory of the World' programme.
The Sana'a Palimpsest was given the catalog number DAM 01-27.1, indicating a manuscript with variable lines to the page, written line length of approx. 27 cm, and with a sequence indicator of '1'. By 2015 some 38 folio fragments had been identified as likely to belong to this particular manuscript. From 2007, a joint Italian-French team under Sergio Noja Noseda and Christian Robin undertook to produce new high-resolution digital images of DAM 01-27.1, under both natural and ultra-violet light, which have since been subject to extensive computerised post-processing by Alba Fedeli to separate upper from lower texts. The high resolution images form the basis for the editions of both Sadeghi and Goudarzi, and of Asma Hilali.
Contents of the manuscript
The manuscript is a palimpsest, meaning the parchment was written over once. The original text was erased, and written over a second time with this process potentially being repeated over time with the same parchment. In the Sana'a palimpsest, both the upper and the lower text are the Qur'an written in the Hijazi script. The upper text appears to present a complete text of the Qur'an, as did the lower text according to a codicological reconstruction by Éléonore Cellard. In the standard Qur'an, the chapters are presented in an approximate sequence of decreasing length; hence a fragmentary Qur'an that follows the standard order of suras can generally be assumed to have once presented the complete text, but the contrary is not the case. Cellard's reconstruction has found that despite differences of sura sequence, the lower text too follows this same principle.The manuscript that was discovered, however, is not complete. About 82 folios have been identified as possible sheets presenting the upper text, of which 38 are in Yemen's Dār al-Makhṭūṭāt and 4 in private collections. In addition in 2012, 40 palimpsest folios conserved in the Eastern Library of the Grand Mosque in Sana’a and published in 2004, were recognised as likely being detached folios of the upper text of DAM 01-27.1. Many of the folios in the House of Manuscripts are physically incomplete and in only 28 is the upper writing legible, whereas those in private possession or held by the Eastern Library are generally in a better condition. These 82 folios comprise roughly half of the Quran. The parchment is of inferior quality, with many folios having holes around which both upper and lower text have been written. However, when the scale of the writing and the provision of marginal spaces is taken into account, the overall quantity of animal hides implied as being committed to the production of a full manuscript of the Qur'an would not have been less than for such high quality Qur'ans as the Codex Parisino-petropolitanus.
Historian Michael Cook sums up preliminary work on the Sana'a fragments as of 2000 thusly:
Upper text
The upper text conforms entirely with that underlying the modern Quran in use, and has been dated as probably from sometime between the end of the 7th and the beginning of the 8th century CE. Asma Hilali provides a full transcription of the upper text from the 26 legible folios in the House of Manuscripts, and found 17 non-orthographic variants in these pages, where readings differ from those in the "standard" Qur'an text, as presented in the 1924 Cairo edition. Five of these 17 variants in the upper text correspond to known Qira'at readings in the tradition of quranic variants.The density of the writing of the upper text varies from page to page and within pages, such that the amount of text transcribed on each page varies from 18.5 lines of the standard Cairo edition to as many as 37 lines. Subsequent to the completion of the text, polychrome decoration has been added in the form of bands separating the suras, and indicators of 10, 50 and 100 verse divisions in a variety of particular forms. Much of these decorations are unfinished. In addition, the upper text formerly included individual verse separators – some contemporary with the text, others inserted later. The counts of verses corresponding to the polychrome verse indicators are not consistent with the counts of individual verse indicators, implying that the former were copied across other Qur'ans.
Lower text
The surviving lower text from 36 of the folio in the House of Manuscripts, together with the lower text from those auctioned abroad, were published in March 2012 in a long essay by Behnam Sadeghi and Mohsen Goudarzi. Prior to that, in 2010, Sadeghi had published an extensive study of the four folios auctioned abroad, and analyzed their variants using textual critical methods. The German scholar Elizabeth Puin, whose husband was the local director of the restoration project until 1985, has also transcribed the lower text of several folios in five successive publications. The lower text of the palimpsest folios in the Eastern Library has not been studied or published yet, and it is not known how many of these folios may witness the same lower text as those in the House of Manuscripts; however, it appears likely that the four auctioned folios came from this section of the manuscript, and not from DAM 01-27.1. While transcription from Hamdoun's photographs are a particularly difficult challenge, Hythem Sidky has identified lower textual sequences in most of the Eastern Library folios.The lower text was erased and written over, but due to the presence of metals in the ink, the lower text has resurfaced, and now appears in a light brown color, the visibility of which can be enhanced in ultra-violet light. Parchment was expensive and durable, and so it was common practice to scrape the writing from disused and damaged texts for potential re-use. But while there are other known instances of disused Qur'ans being reused for other texts, there are only a few known instances of a new Qur'an being written using re-used parchment, and all these examples are believed to have been from the Sana'a cache. The re-use in this case may have been purely for economic reasons. The standardization of the Quranic text around 650 CE by 'Uthmān may have led to a non-standard lower text becoming obsolete, and erased in accordance with authoritative instructions to that effect.
In places, individual readings in the lower text appear to have been corrected in a separate hand to conform better to corresponding readings in the standard Qur'an. Elizabeth Puin has termed this hand the 'lower modifier', and proposes that these corrections were undertaken before the whole lower text was erased or washed off.
Although the suras of the lower text do not follow the canonical order, nevertheless, with only two exceptions, within each sura, the surviving lower text presents the verses in the same order as the standard Qur'an – the exceptions being in sura 20, where Sadeghi and Goudarzi find that verses 31 and 32 are swapped, and in sura 9, where Sadeghi and Goudarzi find that the whole of verse 85 is absent, which he explains as "parablepsis, a form of scribal error in which the eye skips from one text to a similar text". Neither of these passages of the lower text are in folios that Asma Hilali found to be legible. Some of the variants between the lower text and the standard Qur'an are provided by Sadeghi and Goudarzi below. It is noticeable that the Lower text has many variations of words and phrases in comparison to the text of the standard Qur'an, however they rarely diverge from the fundamental meaning that the text is intending to communicate.