Folio from a Quran in Hijazi script
Seventh century
A single sheet of parchment, browned with age, carries lines of brown ink in a tall, slanting Arabic script. This is Hijazi, the earliest form of Arabic writing used for the Quran, named after the Hijaz, the region of Mecca and Medina. The letters lean to the right, the lines are uneven and the words are widely spaced, with almost none of the dots and vowel marks that later scribes would add. It was written in the seventh century, within a few generations of the Prophet Muhammad's death in 632, and it is among the oldest Quran fragments in existence.
Look carefully under the visible text and you may see faint ghosts of other letters. The sheet is a palimpsest: an earlier Quranic text was washed off the expensive parchment and the surface was reused for a new copy. The traces of the lower writing have been studied under ultraviolet light and show small differences from the standard text, which makes fragments of this kind precious evidence for how the Quran was first written down and fixed. The scribe worked in a vertical format on animal skin, in a plain style with no decoration, because at this early date the text itself was the whole point.
The museum displays the folio in its chapter on the universal religions, beside a Gothic Bible, a Torah scroll and Buddhist and Hindu texts of comparable age, in line with its idea of setting the world's faiths in conversation. For a museum in the Arabian Peninsula, an early Quran leaf is a natural cornerstone. Notice the ruled margins scratched into the parchment to guide the writing, and the way the scribe stretched some letters to fill a line.
Did You Know? Under ultraviolet light the erased earlier text beneath the visible writing becomes legible, turning one sheet into two Qurans.
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