There is first, of course, the Koran,[270] consisting "exclusively of the revelations or commands which Muḥammad professed, from time to time, to receive through Gabriel as a message direct from God; and which, under an alleged Divine direction, he delivered to those about him. At the time of pretended inspiration, or shortly after, each passage was recited by Muḥammad before the Companions or followers who happened to be present, and was generally committed to writing by some one amongst them upon palm-leaves, leather, stones, or such other rude material as conveniently came to hand. These Divine messages continued throughout the three-and-twenty years of his prophetical life, so that the last portion did not appear till the year of his death. The canon was then closed; but the contents were never, during the Prophet's lifetime, systematically arranged, or even collected together."[271] They were preserved, however, in fragmentary copies and, especially, by oral recitation until the sanguinary wars which followed Muḥammad's death had greatly diminished the number of those who could repeat them by heart. Accordingly, after the battle of Yamáma (633 A.D.) ‘Umar b. al-Khaṭṭáb came to Abú Bakr, who was then Caliph, and said: "I fear that slaughter may wax hot among the Reciters on other battle-fields, and that much of the Koran may be lost; so in my opinion it should be collected without delay." Abú Bakr agreed, and entrusted the task to Zayd b. Thábit, one of the Prophet's amanuenses, who collected the fragments with great difficulty "from bits of parchment, thin white stones, leafless palm-branches, and the bosoms of men." The manuscript thus compiled was deposited with Abú Bakr during the remainder of his life, then with ‘Umar, on whose death it passed to his daughter Ḥafṣa. Afterwards, in the Caliphate of ‘Uthmán, Ḥudhayfa b. al-Yamán, observing that the Koran as read in Syria was seriously at variance with the text current in ‘Iráq, warned the Caliph to interfere, lest the Sacred Book of the Moslems should become a subject of dispute, like the Jewish and Christian scriptures. In the year 651 A.D. ‘Uthmán ordered Zayd b. Thábit to prepare a Revised Version with the assistance of three Qurayshites, saying to the latter, "If ye differ from Zayd regarding any word of the Koran, write it in the dialect of Quraysh; for it was revealed in their dialect."[272] This has ever since remained the final and standard recension of the Koran. "Transcripts were multiplied and forwarded to the chief cities in the empire, and all previously existing copies were, by the Caliph's command, committed to the flames."[273] In the text as it has come down to us the various readings are few and unimportant, and its genuineness is above suspicion. We shall see, moreover, that the Koran is an exceedingly human document, reflecting every phase of Muḥammad's personality and standing in close relation to