LONDON.- Christies announced the results achieved for the palimpsest of a Quran copied onto a Christian text, realising £596,790 during the Art of the Islamic and Indian Worlds Including Oriental Rugs and Carpets auction. As Lot 1 of the sale, this remarkable manuscript dates to the earliest period of Islam. The leaves from these folios derive from an earlier Coptic manuscript containing passages from the Book of Deuteronomy, which is part of the Torah and the Christian Old Testament. It was very probably produced in Egypt, home to the Coptic community, at the time of the Arab conquest. This appears to be the only recorded example of a Quran written above a Christian text, and the importance of this manuscript resonates with the historical reality of religious communities in the Near East and as such is an invaluable survival from the earliest centuries of Islam.
This remarkable discovery was made with the help of French scholar Dr. Eléonore Cellard, as the folios are in fact a palimpsest, a manuscript from which the first writing has been effaced so that the vellum could be reused. Beneath the Arabic script an original Coptic text may clearly be seen.
Dr. Eléonore Cellard, Postdoctoral fellowship at Collège de France, Paris This is a very important discovery for the history of the Quran and early Islam. We have here a witness of cultural interactions between different religious communities.
Eleonore Cellard is attached to the College de France, a leading academic institution based in Paris. She works under the supervision of Prof Déroche, the leading expert in the field of early Islamic scripts and early Islamic codicology.
Quranic palimpsests are extremely rare and only a handful are known:
1. Two leaves from a 7th century Hijazi Quran, sold at Christies, London, 8 April 2008, lot 20 (sold £2,484,500) and 01 May 2001, lot 12 (sold for £163,250). The Quranic text is copied above an earlier version of the Quran.
2. The late 7th /early 8th century Mingana-Lewis Palimpsest (MS Or.1287) at the Cambridge University Library. The Hijazi script has been erased and the leaves were used for a 9th /10th century codex of Christian Arabic homilies produced in Palestine. The palimpsest was acquired by Agnes Smith Lewis in Suez in 1895.
3. A leaf from a 7th century Hijazi Quran in Sana (Masahif Sana, exhibition catalogue, Kuwait, 1983, cat.4, p.59). The surviving Quranic text is copied above an earlier version of the Quran.
4. The present folios, dating from the 8th century.