April
30
/ 2018
A rare manuscript has become a unique one thanks to the eagle eyes of a French scholar. Dr. Eléonore Cellard noticed that there was barely visible text beneath an 8th century copy of holy scripture of the Qur’an. And that new information may have influenced bidding when it was sold at an auction - the text brought in almost five times the asking price! The Guardian reports Dr. Cellard came across the Qur’an fragment while she was searching the catalogue of Christie’s auction house for a palimpsest (a manuscript page which has text scraped or washed off it so that it can be reused for another document) which they sold a decade ago. What she found instead was a vellum
