Mingana-Lewis palimpsest

A palimpsest — vellum whose first text was erased and written over — bought by Agnes Smith Lewis at Suez in 1895. Its upper script is Arabic homilies of Church Fathers, dated by Cowley of Oxford and Ellis of the British Museum to the very end of the ninth or the beginning of the tenth century. Beneath are eighty-four leaves of Syriac in two columns of Estrangelo, a leaf of the Greek Septuagint of Genesis, and leaves of the Syriac Old Testament palimpsested twice, so that some pages carry three crossing scripts. ¹

Among the Syriac quires are six Arabic ones: some forty-four leaves of Kufic lying crossways to the upper script, so that the lines running along the margins read more easily. The leaves measure about 20 × 12 cm, but those of "Qur'an A" were larger and were trimmed by the later scribe to match their neighbours; they form the last two quires (fols 147–161). The vellum of B and C is thinner and beginning to split, having been rubbed hard with pumice to erase the text. Because the scribe folded and turned the original pages, every Qur'an page carries two numbers. ^{2 3 4}

After the 1902 publication Lewis gave it to the binders Eyre and Spottiswoode, who set the leaves within strong paper ones and mended torn leaves with fine transparent gauze — somewhat hindering decipherment but saving pages that would otherwise be lost. Some pages are now illegible; the editors marked missing text with dots and, where a word was certainly present but unreadable, supplied it in square brackets from the standard text. ⁴

Mingana divided its Qur'anic writing into three kinds (A, B, C), likening the first to eighth-century hands; the editors thought the leaves possibly pre-Uthmanic — their view as set out in their book, not the museum's judgement. ^{3 5 6}