The Cache in the Roof, and the Decades of Reading It

In 1972 workmen repairing the Great Mosque of Sana'a after heavy rain opened a space between the ceiling and the roof and found it packed with parchment and paper. This was not a hidden library. Placing worn copies of the Quran somewhere they cannot be trodden on or destroyed is ordinary respectful disposal, and a mosque roof is a common place for it. What made this cache extraordinary was its age and its size: tens of thousands of fragments, some of them from the first century of Islam.

Conserving it took decades and outside help, principally a German-funded project from the late 1970s, which cleaned, flattened and catalogued the material and moved it to the Dar al-Makhtutat. In 1981 one manuscript was recognised as a palimpsest, and the work of recovering its lower layer began, running through ultraviolet photography and eventually X-ray fluorescence imaging as the technology arrived. Substantial publication of the readings did not begin until the 2000s, which is thirty years after the find.

A small number of folios of the same manuscript had left Yemen and are in private hands and other collections; one, now at Stanford, is the leaf that was radiocarbon dated. The condition of what remains in Sana'a has been a real concern since the Yemeni civil war, and the imaging done before it is now part of the record in its own right.