LONDON, UK 27 April 2018: The palimpsest of a Quran copied onto a Christian text achieved a sale price of £596,790 during the Art of the Islamic and Indian Worlds Including Oriental Rugs and Carpets auction by Christie’s.
The pre-auction estimate was between £80,000 and £120,000
Lot 1 of the sale was a remarkable manuscript dating 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 are an invaluable survival from the earliest centuries of Islam.
With the help of French scholar Dr. Eléonore Cellard, this remarkable discovery was made, as the folios are in fact a palimpsest, which is 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.