Writings: IslamQaf 47 and Berlin Ms. or. fol. 431310 of 10

Writings: Islam

Qaf 47 and Berlin Ms. or. fol. 4313

Corpus Coranicum treats Cairo's Qaf 47 and Berlin's Ms. or. fol. 4313 as parts of one early Quran in Hijazi script on parchment. Radiocarbon tests on two Berlin leaves date the parchment to 606 to 652 CE at 95.4 percent probability. The same catalog estimates the writing before 680 CE, and Stephen Shoemaker suggests about 700 CE.

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Three dates, kept apart

  1. The text's date: the tradition's view

    610 to 650 CE (revelation 610 to 632 CE; the written standard text under Uthman about 650 CE, as David Thomas reports the Muslim account, and within Uthman's rule of 644 to 656 CE, which Abdullah Saeed gives as the time Muslim tradition holds the Quran was compiled; Yousef Wahb gives the 23 years of revelation, and Abu al-Qasim al-Khoei places the standard text under Uthman)

  2. The text's date: critical scholars' view

    610 to 705 CE (the strip starts at 610 CE, the date Muslim tradition gives for the first revelations, borrowed here because the scholarly sources used give no start year; it ends at the later of two views of the standard written text: Nicolai Sinai holds 650 CE or earlier as the default view, and Stephen Shoemaker argues for 685 to 705 CE, under Abd al-Malik, while allowing that much of the content may go back to Muhammad's preaching in the early seventh century)

  3. This copy made

    606 to 652 CE (radiocarbon on the parchment of two Berlin leaves, 95.4 percent probability, as Michael Marx and Tobias Jocham report; this dates the skin, not the writing, which Corpus Coranicum estimates before 680 CE and Stephen Shoemaker suggests was about 700 CE)

  4. This copy found

    The sources used here do not say when or how the codex was found. Corpus Coranicum lists its provenance as Egypt, and Shoemaker calls it of Cairene provenance. The earliest record in the sources used here is a plate in an album that Bernhard Moritz published in 1905, which printed an image of it while it was kept in the Khedivial Library in Cairo; the Berlin leaves were acquired in 1939 from Moritz's estate.

All four rows share one timeline. A row with no marker says why in words. How ancient texts are dated.

What it is

Corpus Coranicum treats Qaf 47 and Ms. or. fol. 4313 as parts of one Quran written on parchment, animal skin prepared for writing, in a Hijazi hand.12 Hijazi is one of several early Arabic scripts named for the Hijaz, the region where they developed.3 The larger part is in Cairo, under the shelfmark Qaf 47. Seven leaves are in the Berlin State Library.14

The Berlin leaves hold 4:137 to 4:155 and 4:172 to 5:87, given as surah and verse (a surah is a chapter of the Quran).15 They carry occasional diacritical marks, the dots that tell similar letters apart, and no vowel signs.13 Corpus Coranicum counts 33 leaves in Cairo and Marijn van Putten lists 36 for the whole codex; the sources used here do not reconcile them.16

How the copy was dated

Radiocarbon dating measures the carbon left in organic material and gives a range of years at a stated probability.2 Marx and Jocham, of the Corpus Coranicum project, report samples from two Berlin leaves, folios 2 and 5, run at the ETH Zurich laboratory. They give a range of 606 to 652 CE at 95.4 percent probability.2

The project's catalog recalibrates the two samples with OxCal 2020 to 605 to 651 CE combined.1 The method dates the animal skin, not the writing.2 Earlier, Bernhard Moritz and Rudolf Sellheim dated the manuscript to the ninth century. Adolf Grohmann and Sergio Noja Noseda suggested the first century AH (the Islamic calendar), the seventh CE.78

Marx and Jocham hold that decades between making the parchment and writing on it are unlikely for economic reasons, and that the manuscript's old spellings point the same way. The project's catalog estimates 640 to 680 CE and puts the manuscript before about 680.21 For the methods, see how ancient texts are dated.

Stephen Shoemaker argues that the radiocarbon result cannot by itself date the writing. To his knowledge, no codicological study of this manuscript existed to test it. From its photographs he judges it very like the other early manuscripts he discusses, and he suggests it was produced around 700 CE. If the radiocarbon dates are kept and the Quran does not predate Muhammad, he argues, parchment must often have sat in storage for decades before use.9

The text: its date and authorship

The date strip marks the Quran's text, not this codex. Both text rows start at 610 CE, the year Muslim tradition gives for the first revelations, and the scholars' row borrows that start because the sources used here give no start year. It ends at the later of the two views below, Nicolai Sinai's 650 CE or earlier and Stephen Shoemaker's 685 to 705 CE. The copy bar starts at 606 CE because it marks the animal's life, not the writing, so it can begin before the text does.25109

The tradition's view

Two sources in this column are scholars' reports of what Muslims hold: Abdullah Saeed's encyclopedia article and David Thomas's comments in a university release. Saeed writes that the standard traditional Muslim view, Sunni and Shia alike, holds that God alone composed the Quran. On this view Muhammad passed it on without addition or alteration. Saeed adds that Muslim tradition holds it was compiled in the caliphate of Uthman (ruled 644 to 656 CE).11

Yousef Wahb of the Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research writes that the Quran is God's speech and that God promised to protect it. He writes that it was revealed over 23 years and kept in memory and in writing, with oral transmission through memorization the primary method.12 The Sunni hadith collection of al-Bukhari (a hadith is a report of what Muhammad said or did) says the caliph Abu Bakr had the Quran gathered. It says the caliph Uthman later had copies sent to the provinces.131415

The Shia scholar Abu al-Qasim al-Khoei rejects the reports that credit the caliphs, Abu Bakr among them, with collecting the Quran, as inconsistent with one another. He holds that it existed as a complete written collection in Muhammad's lifetime and that Uthman united Muslims on one authoritative reading.1617 David Thomas reports Muslim tradition as dating the revelation 610 to 632 CE and the written text under Uthman about 650 CE.5

Scholars of the Quran's history: Sinai and Shoemaker

Nicolai Sinai, in a 2014 article, writes that Islamic tradition credits the standard consonantal text, the letters without vowel signs, to Uthman. In recent years, he writes, various scholars have espoused a conjectural dating of its codification to Abd al-Malik's time, or have at least taken the view that it stayed open to significant revision until about 700 CE. He holds that 650 CE or earlier, the traditional dating, should remain the default view, apart from some spelling features. That holds unless passages of a distinct style and vocabulary can be compellingly placed in the late seventh century.10

Stephen Shoemaker, in a book of 2022, argues that the Quran was composed and recomposed in oral transmission for decades after Muhammad's death. He adds that much of its content was presumably inspired by Muhammad's teachings. He holds that the canonical text took shape under Abd al-Malik (ruled 685 to 705 CE). As he reads them, the early manuscripts and their radiocarbon dates fit that view best, though he does not rule out earlier collections.9 He writes that most modern scholarship has placed uncomplicated confidence in the account of a text fixed under Uthman around 650 CE, and calls that confidence undeserved.9

These passages are about when and how the standard text took shape. They do not take up what Muslims hold about who composed it.

How it was found

The sources used here do not say when or how the codex was found. Corpus Coranicum lists its provenance as Egypt, and Shoemaker calls it of Cairene provenance.19 The earliest record in the sources used here is a plate in an album that Bernhard Moritz published in 1905. It printed an image of the manuscript while it was kept in the Khedivial Library in Cairo. Moritz directed that library from 1896 to 1911.1

The Berlin State Library acquired the seven leaves in 1939 from Moritz's estate, and he died that year. Corpus Coranicum says they come from the same codex as another part, 33 leaves, now in the Egyptian National Library.1

What it shows, and what it does not

It shows that an early Quran in a Hijazi hand, which Corpus Coranicum calls a variation of type II in Deroche's typology, was written on parchment whose skin dates to 606 to 652 CE.12 Marx and Jocham read its spelling and its radiocarbon result together as placing it among the oldest surviving witnesses to the written text.2 Van Putten counts it among 14 early manuscripts that he reads as descending from one written archetype.6

It does not show when the writing was done, only when the skin was made, and Marx and Jocham and Shoemaker differ on how large the gap could be. The samples came from two of the seven Berlin leaves, and the sources used here report no result for the Cairo part.2 It does not show who wrote it or where. A 2025 article describes both parts in detail, but only its abstract was read here.7

See also

Sources

  1. Michael Marx (with Salome Beridze and Tobias J. Jocham), Manuscripta Coranica, Corpus Coranicum. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin: Ms. or. fol. 4313 (VOHD 17, A, 1, 1) (catalogue entry). Corpus Coranicum, CC BY 4.0, the header fields, the catalogue entry, and the palaeography note. Accessed 2026-11-06.
  2. Michael Josef Marx and Tobias J. Jocham. Radiocarbon (14C) Dating of Qur'an Manuscripts. In Andreas Kaplony and Michael Marx (eds.), Qur'an Quotations Preserved on Papyrus Documents, 7th to 10th Centuries, and the Problem of Carbon Dating Early Qur'ans (Brill, Leiden, 2019), chapter 6, pp. 188 to 221, 2019, pp. 188 to 217; Table 6.2 on p. 216. Accessed 2026-11-06.
  3. Colin F. Baker (British Library, Head of Middle Eastern and Central Asian Collections). The British Library's oldest Qur'an manuscript now online. British Library, Asian and African studies blog, 7 April 2016 (Internet Archive copy), 2016, the whole post. Accessed 2026-11-06.
  4. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. Koran (Fragment), Ms. or. fol. 4313 (Digitalisierte Sammlungen). Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, the record fields (library IIIF manifest) and the page list. Accessed 2026-11-06.
  5. University of Birmingham. Birmingham Qur'an manuscript dated among the oldest in the world. University of Birmingham, 2015. Accessed 2026-10-29.
  6. Marijn van Putten. 'The Grace of God' as Evidence for a Written Uthmanic Archetype: The Importance of Shared Orthographic Idiosyncrasies. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 82, no. 2 (June 2019), pp. 271 to 288, Cambridge University Press (open access, CC BY 4.0), 2019, abstract, the passage on Dutton, and the section 'The manuscripts' (pp. 271 to 288). Accessed 2026-11-06.
  7. Abdallah El-Khatib and Ahmed W. Shaker. An Early Hijazi Qur'an Fragment at the Dar al-Kutub and its Berlin Counterpart. Journal of Qur'anic Studies 27, no. 1 (2025), pp. 1 to 27, Edinburgh University Press, 2025, abstract only. Accessed 2026-11-06.
  8. Marilyn Robinson Waldman; revised by Bruce B. Lawrence. Nubuwah. Encyclopedia of Religion (1987, revised 2005), via Encyclopedia.com, 2005. Accessed 2026-10-29.
  9. Stephen J. Shoemaker. Creating the Qur'an: A Historical-Critical Study. University of California Press (Luminos open access), 2022, introduction (radiocarbon summary; Abd al-Malik, p. 13; pp. 3 and 14 to 15), chapter 1 (p. 17 and pp. 25 to 30), chapter 2 (p. 43), the radiocarbon chapter (pp. 73 to 86), and p. 238 (printed page numbers). Accessed 2026-10-29.
  10. Nicolai Sinai. When did the consonantal skeleton of the Quran reach closure? Part II. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 77, no. 3, 2014, abstract. Accessed 2026-10-29.
  11. Abdullah Saeed. Qur'an: Tradition of Scholarship and Interpretation. Encyclopedia of Religion, second edition (Macmillan Reference USA), via Encyclopedia.com, 2005. Accessed 2026-10-29.
  12. Yousef Wahb. How the Quran Was Preserved During the Prophet's Time: Mechanisms of Oral and Written Transmission. Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research, 2022. Accessed 2026-10-28.
  13. Muhammad al-Bukhari (compiler). Sahih al-Bukhari 4986, English translation. Hadith Unlocked, hadith 4986. Accessed 2026-10-29.
  14. Muhammad al-Bukhari (compiler). Sahih al-Bukhari 4987, English translation. Hadith Unlocked, hadith 4987. Accessed 2026-10-29.
  15. Mohammad Hashim Kamali. Hadith. Encyclopedia of Religion, second edition (Macmillan Reference USA), via Encyclopedia.com, 2005. Accessed 2026-10-29.
  16. Abu al-Qasim al-Khoei, translated by Abdulaziz A. Sachedina. The Prolegomena to the Qur'an, chapter 8: The Collection of the Qur'an. Oxford University Press (1998); online at Al-Islam.org, 1998, chapter 8. Accessed 2026-10-29.
  17. Al-Islam.org (Ahlul Bayt Digital Islamic Library Project). Sayyid Abu al-Qasim al-Khoei (biographical page, Shia Scholars). Al-Islam.org, the biography paragraph on the person page. Accessed 2026-11-06.