Manuscripts · a Light

The Istanbul codex called Uthman's was written later

Topkapi Palace in Istanbul holds a very large early Qur'an, missing only two pages of the entire text, which tradition names as one of the copies Uthman had made. The Turkish scholar Tayyar Altikulac produced a full facsimile and study of it, and later work has gone further. The vowel marking and the dotting it carries were developed after Uthman's lifetime, and the letter forms point to the eighth century rather than the seventh. Manuscripts in Istanbul, Cairo, Tashkent and Mashhad all carry the same attribution and none of them survives that test. They are genuinely early and genuinely important. What is disputed is the label, not the age.

Topkapi Palace Museum, Istanbul

Source · Scholars differ: Tayyar Altikulac dates the manuscript between the late first and early second century AH, while more recent study rejects t