Sana'a Manuscripts - Discovery and Assessment

Discovery and Assessment

In 1972, construction workers renovating a wall in the attic of the Great Mosque of Sana'a in Yemen 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.

Qadhi Isma'il al-Akwa', 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 Qur'anic and non-Qur'anic material. Of special importance is a palimpsest with two layers of text, both of which are Qur'anic. While the upper text is almost identical with the modern Qur'ans in use (with the exception of spelling variants), the lower text contains significant diversions from the standard text. For example, in sura 2, verse 87, the lower text has wa-qaffaynā 'alā āthārihi whereas the standard text has wa-qaffaynā min ba'dihi. Such variants are similar to the ones reported for the Qur'an codices of Companions such as Ibn Mas'ud and Ubayy b. Ka'b. Carl Ernst, an Islamic studies scholar, states that the manuscripts "do not appear to have any startling or major changes but belong to the class of minor textual variations that have been known for centuries." Variants occur much more frequently in the Sana'a codex, which contains "by a rough estimate perhaps twenty-five times as many ".

The lower text of the manuscript 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. A number of reasons may have led to erasure of the lower text: some pages of the codex may have been destroyed or worn out, thereby requiring the production of a new codex, for which the already available parchment was used. (This was a common practice in ancient times. When enough of a manuscript's writing wore off—ink does not bond to parchment like it does to paper—all of the writing was washed off to make the expensive parchment usable for a new text. This was an ancient way of recycling.) Alternatively, the standardization of the Qur'anic text by 'Uthmān may have led to the non-standard lower text becoming obsolete, and thereby erased. This latter theory is consistent with carbon-14 tests, which make it likely that the lower text was written before 'Uthmān standardized the Qur'anic text: the parchment (and therefore the lower text) has a 75% probability of being older than 650 AD, and a 95% probability of being older than 660 AD.