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.

Sana manuscript