Three Qurʾānic Folios from a Collection in Finland

Abstract

This is a contribution to the study of the Qurʾānic text through an edition and study of three folios, called K176, K182, and K185, that are paleographically relatively early. The folios do not belong to the same codex but are separate leaves; they are kept at a private collection in Finland called the Ilves Collection. We can place them, tentatively, to the third/ninth century. The Qurʾānic folios presented here attest some variant spellings to the text of the Cairo edition. The parchments have, in many cases, the scriptio plena where Cairo has a more defective writing (the medial ā). They give us more evidence that the rasm of Qurʾānic manuscripts was not completely stable.