Digital Lunch Seminar Series: Two Inks and a Qur'anic Fragment on Parchment
Foto: Esfandiari/UHH
Wann: Mo, 13.05.2024, 12:00 Uhr bis 13:00 Uhr
Wo: Digital
Two Inks and a Qur’anic Fragment on Parchment: Insights from a Cross-disciplinary Study
Alba Fedeli and Sowmeya Sathiyamani
When working on (early) Qur’anic manuscripts, the study of their textual contents, production and use cannot be divorced from the study of their materiality, as the layers of the writing system of the manuscripts’ texts convey meaning. The analysis of the materials that constitute these layers can provide precious information about their relative chronology, which is essential when dealing with undated, unlocated and fragmentary manuscripts.
In this work, we share our results from an interdisciplinary study of three fragmentary parchment leaves, currently part of the collection at the Institut für Arabistik und Islamwissenschaft, Universität Münster. These fragments likely belonged to a larger Qur’anic codex from Cairo, and have been dated to around 9th – 10th century C.E. The writing system uses only the consonantal skeleton and consonantal diacritics to distinguish homograph letters. The script is monochromatic and there are traces of reinking of part of the text. Certain sections of the inked areas show deterioration, signalling at ink corrosion. The inks were characterized following the protocol developed at the CSMC and BAM. The results revealed the use of iron-gall ink with different elemental compositions. Two different variants of the ink were used for writing the manuscript, the first one that was used to pen the entire text at the time of its production, and a second one, used for adjusting and re-inking sections of the text. The differentiation of the inks provided insights for the relative chronology of the layers and a novel understanding of the object. The interdisciplinary approach to the study of the parchment leaves - bringing together palaeography, codicology, history of the text, philology and material analysis - revealed its potentialities when the object is addressed in its wholeness.