The Origin of the Sana'a Lower Text

A Manuscript That Was Written Twice

In the loft of the Great Mosque of Sana'a in Yemen, in 1972, workers repairing a wall after heavy rains found a gap stuffed with old parchment and paper. Among the crumbling fragments was something unusual: sheets of very early Qur'anic parchment that had been used, scraped clean, and written over again. Under the visible Qur'anic text lay a fainter, erased one beneath it — a ghost of an earlier hand.

Manuscripts written, erased, and reused are called palimpsests. What made this one — catalogued as DAM 01-27.1 and known to scholars as Sana'a 1 — so debated is what the erased lower layer seems to contain: a Qur'an that does not read, word for word, exactly like the standard Qur'an, and does so in ways that line up, in places, with reports about the personal codices of certain Companions of the Prophet. This article is a focused follow-up to the general story of the Sana'a palimpsest. Here the question is narrower and sharper: what is that lower text, and where did it come from?