This fragment of the Quran has been dated to the second half of the 7th century – the 1st century in the Hijri or Islamic calendar. If this is the case, these are the oldest known written Surah in existence.
The parchment was dated last year using carbon-14 analysis at the ETH Laboratory of Ion Beam Physics in Zurich, Switzerland. The conclusion was that it had been written between 649 and 675, or as little as 20 years after the death of the Prophet. It had been previously thought that it dated from the 8th century, so about 100 years later.
This page begins at ayah, or verse, 37 of surah 17, The Journey by Night: “Do not stride forth jaunty on earth, you will not thereby traverse the earth, nor reach up to the mountains in height.”
The fragment ends with verse 57 of surah 36, Ya Sin: “There they shall have fruits and all that they wish for.”
The pages belong to the library of the University of Tuebingen in southern Germany and were dated as part of the Coranica Project, a collaboration between French and German academics investigating the history of Quranic texts using empirical evidence.
The university acquired the fragment in 1864, as part of the collection of Johann Gottfried Wetzein, a Prussian consul who spent 12 years in Damascus when it was part of the Ottoman Empire. It is written in Kufic script, the form of calligraphy known to have been used in the earliest Qurans.
One theory is that it may be connected to Ali ibn Abi Talib, the son-in-law of the Prophet and the fourth Caliph from AD656 until his death in 661.
Ali is said to be the only one of the original followers of the Prophet to fully memorise the Quran.
In terms of its antiquity, the only rival to the Tuebingen pages was found in 1972 during a restoration of the Great Mosque in Sanaa and dated, with 99 per cent accuracy, to 671, meaning that the fragment shown here could be up to 32 years older.
jlangton@thenational.ae
