Cadbury Research Library at the University of Birmingham, UK is now officially the holder of the planet’s oldest pieces of the Quran.
From GeoBeats News [1]:
The world’s oldest fragments of the Koran may be in Birmingham, UK.
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Radiocarbon analysis of a manuscript in the library at the University of Birmingham dates the sheep or goat skin pages to between 568 and 645 AD.
This places the manuscript close to the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad, who is widely believed to have lived between 570 and 632 AD. Islamic tradition holds that the revelations comprising the Koran were received by the Prophet Muhammad beginning in 610 and through the year of his death.
“The person who actually wrote [the manuscript] could well have known the Prophet…he would maybe have heard him preach,” said David Thomas, the university’s professor of Christianity and Islam.
And, it’s almost certain that the pages date from the time of the first three caliphs—the stewards of Islam after Muhammad’s death—who first compiled the tenets of the Muslim faith into book form, according to the Lead Curator for Persian and Turkish Manuscripts at the British Library.
The manuscript had been essentially ignored for nearly 100 years after being wrongly bound with pages of a similar-looking Koran from the seventh century.
PhD researcher Alba Fedeli was studying the pages and noticed something amiss, so she decided they should be radiocarbon dated.
The results speak for themselves.
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