Alphonse Mingana

The title page calls him "Rev. Alphonse Mingana, D.D., late Professor of Semitic Languages and Literature in the Syro-Chaldaean Seminary at Mosul", and Agnes Lewis describes him as an Assyrian scholar whose native language is Arabic and the most competent person she knew to decipher her palimpsest. ^{1 2 3}

Mingana grouped the Qur'anic writing in the palimpsest into three kinds, provisionally called Qur'an A, B and C. A resembles a plate of the Palaeographical Society assigned to the eighth century and contains Suras al-Nur, al-Qasas, al-Ankabut, al-Mu'min, al-Sajda (Fussilat), al-Dukhan and al-Jathiya; B is a smaller, thinner "Kufo-Naskhi" sloping to the left, with suras from Hud to al-Isra'; C is smaller, taller and entirely without diacritical points, with parts of al-A'raf and al-Tawba. He thought some leaves of B and some suras of A came from other manuscripts, because of differences in thickness of script, number of lines, verse markers and spelling. ^{4 5}

His introduction openly urges Muslim scholars to adopt the "higher criticism" of Christian theologians and characterises the Qur'an from the writer's own standpoint; these are his views, reported here and not adopted by the museum. It also discusses how the absence of dots and vowels in early manuscripts affects their reading and dating. ^{6 4}