The Sana'a Palimpsest: What Does the Erased Text of the Oldest Quran Manuscript Show?
In 1972, workers repairing the Great Mosque of Sana'a found a hidden cache of early Quran manuscripts. One of them, DAM 01-27.1, carries two layers of writing — and the erased lower layer differs from the standard text. Here is what the manuscript shows, what scholars on both sides concluded, and what the traditional sources say about preservation.
By John Shaqi · July 21, 2026 · 15 min read
A Hidden Chamber in the Roof
In 1972, heavy rains damaged the Great Mosque of Sana'a in Yemen — one of the oldest mosques on earth, founded, according to Islamic tradition, in the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad himself. During repairs, workers broke through a wall between the ceiling and the roof and found a forgotten cavity packed with old parchment and paper: tens of thousands of leaves, damp, compressed, partly fused together. The workers stuffed them into around twenty potato sacks and set them on the mosque staircase.
Qadi Ismail al-Akwa, head of the Yemeni Antiquities Authority, recognized what the sacks held: fragments of roughly a thousand early codices of the Quran. In 1981 a restoration project began with German government funding, and two German researchers — Gerd-Rüdiger Puin and Hans-Caspar Graf von Bothmer — spent years cleaning, sorting and photographing the material.
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