The Oldest Quran Ever Found - What the Carbon Dating Revealed | Hidden Quran

University of Birmingham's library for almost a century. When Oxford radiocarbon-dated the animal skin they were written on, the result came back between 568 and 645 CE, with better than 95% confidence, old enough to overlap with the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad. Decades earlier and 3,000 miles away, restorers found a sealed cache of manuscripts inside the roof of the Great Mosque of Sana'a in Yemen. One of them hid a second, erased text beneath the visible one, brought back to life only under ultraviolet light.
This is what the science found on the two oldest Qurans in the world: what the carbon dates prove, what they don't, what the erased layer underneath revealed, and why scholars still can't agree on what any of it means. No sermon. Just the evidence on the table.

📚 Sources & Further Reading

University of Birmingham — 'Birmingham Qur'an manuscript dated among the oldest in the world' (press release, 2015)
Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit (ORAU) — radiocarbon dating of the Mingana 1572a parchment
Cadbury Research Library, Mingana Collection of Middle Eastern Manuscripts (Islamic Arabic 1572)
Alba Fedeli — research on the Birmingham folios and the Alphonse Mingana papers
Corpus Coranicum project, Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences
Behnam Sadeghi & Mohsen Goudarzi — 'Ṣanʿāʾ 1 and the Origins of the Qurʾān,' Der Islam (2012)
Elisabeth Puin — transcription studies of the Sana'a palimpsest (DAM 01-27.1)
Asma Hilali — The Sanaa Palimpsest: The Transmission of the Qur'an in the First Centuries AH (2017)


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