![]() ![]() The manuscript is a palimpsest, meaning the parchment was written over once. The high resolution images form the basis for the editions of both Sadeghi and Goudarzi, and of Asma Hilali. 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 (and other selected manuscripts in the cache), 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. By 2015 some 38 folio fragments had been identified as likely to belong to this particular manuscript. The Sana’a Palimpsest was given the catalog number DAM 01-27.1 indicating a manuscript with variable lines to the page (hence ’01’), written line length of approx 27 cm (11″), and with a sequence indicator of ‘1’. 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. Of the remaining 1500–2000 fragments, he microfilmed a group of 280. In the winter of 1996–7, he microfilmed all of the parchment fragments that have been assigned to distinct Quranic manuscripts. After 1989, Bothmer would visit the collection periodically. The manuscripts are located in the House of Manuscripts, the Dār al-Makhṭūṭāt (DAM), in Ṣan’ā’, Yemen. She also designed the permanent storage, collated many parchment fragments to identify distinct Quranic manuscripts, and directed the Yemeni staff in the same task. She completed the restoration of the manuscripts. Bothmer left Ṣan’ā’ in the following year, but continued to run the project from Germany, traveling to the site almost every year.īeginning in 1982, Ursula Dreibholz served as the conservator for this project, and worked full-time in Ṣan’ā’ until the end of 1989. His involvement came to an end in 1985, when Hans-Caspar Graf von Bothmer (University of Saarland) took over as the local director. ![]() Puin (University of Saarland) was the director beginning with 1981. 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. None is complete and many contain only a few folios apiece. Albrecht Noth (University of Hamburg) was the director of the project. All of them, except 1500–2000 fragments, were assigned to 926 distinct Quranic manuscripts as of 1997. It was funded by the Cultural Section of the German Foreign Ministry. The find includes 12,000 Quranic parchment fragments. Restoration of the fragments began in 1980 under the supervision of the Yemeni Department for Antiquities. The upper text covers Quran 2 (al-Baqarah).265-271. 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. Qadhi Isma’il al-Akwa’, then the president of the Yemeni Antiquities Authority, realized the potential importance of the find. 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. 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. ![]() A partial reconstruction of the lower text was published in 2012 and a reconstruction of the legible portions of both lower and upper texts of the 38 folios in the Sana’a House of Manuscripts was published in 2017 utilising post-processed digital images of the lower text. A radiocarbon analysis has dated the parchment of one of the detached leaves sold at auction, and hence its lower text, to between 578 CE and 669 CE with a 95% accuracy. The upper text largely conforms to the standard ‘Uthmanic’ Quran in text and in the standard order of suras whereas the lower text contains many variations from the standard text, and the sequence of its suras corresponds to no known quranic order. Part of a sizable cache of Quranic and non-Quranic fragments discovered in Yemen during a 1972 restoration of the Great Mosque of Sana’a, the manuscript was identified as a palimpsest Quran in 1981 as it is written on parchment and comprises two layers of text. The Sanaa Manuscript or Sanaa palimpsest (also Ṣanʿā’ 1 or DAM 01-27.1) is one of the oldest Quranic manuscripts in existence.
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