The traditional account places the first revelation in a cave on Mount Ḥirāʾ near Mecca, with the opening verses of sura 96. Al-Bukhārī records the report from ʿĀʾisha. No contemporary record of the event survives, and the date is a traditional one rather than a documented one.
Compilation timeline
From recitation to the printed standard, and what each step in that account rests on.
18
years to a single standard text →
68
years to a script that specifies the word →
302
years to the readings being closed →
1,292
years to the modern printed standard →
Every figure above is measured from 632 CE, the traditional date of the last revelation. The text most readers hold today was fixed as a printed edition in 1924 — 1,292 years later.
The entries below divide into two kinds. Some are attested by physical evidence that can be dated without reference to the literary tradition: a manuscript, a dated printing. Others are reported by Muslim literary sources, the earliest of which were compiled 150–250 years after the events they describe. That is not a claim the reports are false. It is a statement about what kind of evidence they are, and the timeline marks the difference rather than presenting one unbroken run of dated facts.
7 of the 17 entries are physically attested, and only 3 of those fall before 700 CE.
Thirteen centuries
Physically attested
Reported by later sources
Sources disagree
The first 150 years, expanded
- 1The first revelationc. 610 CE
- 2Recitation and memorisationc. 610-632 CE
- 3No single written copy at Muhammad's death632 CE (11 AH)
- 4The Battle of Yamāma633 CE (12 AH)
- 5The first collection, under Abū Bakrc. 633 CE (12 AH)
- 6Rival codicesc. 630s-650s CE
- 7ʿUthmān's recensionc. 650 CE (c. 30 AH)
- 8The other copies are burnedc. 650 CE (c. 30 AH)
- 9The Birmingham foliosradiocarbon 568-645 CE
- 10The Ṣanʿāʾ palimpsest7th century CE
- 11A consonantal skeleton, without dots or vowelsc. 650-700 CE
- 12Dots and vowels are addedlate 7th-early 8th century CE
The entries
Revelation
632 CE (11 AH)
No single written copy at Muhammad's death
عدم جمع القرآن في مصحف واحد
reported by later sources
The Muslim sources themselves record that at Muhammad's death the material existed in memory and on scattered writing surfaces, not as one bound copy. This is not a hostile reading: it is the premise of the collection narratives that follow, which would have no occasion otherwise.
Memorisation
The material was transmitted by recitation and committed to memory. Those who held it were the qurrāʾ or ḥuffāẓ. The tradition also reports writing on whatever was available — palm stalks, thin white stones, shoulder blades, scraps of parchment — held by individuals rather than gathered in one place.
Collection
Al-Bukhārī reports that a large number of reciters were killed at Yamāma, and that ʿUmar urged Abū Bakr to have the material collected before more of it was lost with them. This is the stated motive for the first collection.
Zayd b. Thābit is reported to have been given the task and to have replied that moving a mountain would have been lighter. He gathered the material onto sheets (ṣuḥuf), which passed to Abū Bakr, then to ʿUmar, then to ʿUmar's daughter Ḥafṣa. The same report says the closing verses of sura 9 were found with only one man, Abū Khuzayma al-Anṣārī — a detail the tradition preserves rather than smooths away.
Later sources describe codices associated with individual companions that differed from what became standard. Ibn Masʿūd's is reported to have omitted suras 1, 113 and 114; Ubayy b. Kaʿb's is reported to have contained two short suras, al-Khalʿ and al-Ḥafd, that are not in the standard text. No copy of either survives, so the reports are the only evidence of their contents.
Codification
Al-Bukhārī reports that Ḥudhayfa b. al-Yamān, alarmed at how differently the Syrian and Iraqi troops recited, urged ʿUthmān to act. A committee under Zayd b. Thābit produced a standard copy from Ḥafṣa's sheets, with instruction to prefer the dialect of Quraysh where the committee disagreed. Copies were sent to the garrison cities; the sources differ on how many.
The same report states that ʿUthmān ordered every other copy burned. Ibn Masʿūd is reported to have refused to surrender his. Whatever the earlier codices contained, this is the point after which the question cannot be settled from the manuscripts themselves — the evidence was deliberately destroyed, and what is known of those texts comes from descriptions written down later.
Two parchment leaves holding parts of suras 18-20, radiocarbon dated to between 568 and 645 CE at 95.4% confidence. Among the earliest Qurʾānic material known. Two cautions are standard: the test dates the animal skin rather than the ink, and parchment could be stored or reused; and the range's early end precedes the traditional date of the first revelation.
A manuscript found in the Great Mosque of Ṣanʿāʾ in 1972 whose parchment carries two layers: a standard text written over an erased earlier one. The lower text differs from the standard in word order, in wording, and in the order of the suras. It is the only surviving physical witness to a non-ʿUthmānic text. Scholars disagree about whether it represents one of the companion codices the sources describe.
c. 934 CE (322 AH)
Ibn Mujāhid fixes the seven readings
ابن مجاهد وكتاب السبعة
reported by later sources
Ibn Mujāhid (d. 324 AH / 936 CE) set out seven readings as canonical, each with named transmitters. Readings outside his seven were thereafter treated as irregular, and Ibn Shanabūdh was tried and made to recant for using one. Three further readings were later added to make ten. Roughly three centuries separate ʿUthmān's recension from this closure.
Orthography
c. 650-700 CE
A consonantal skeleton, without dots or vowels
الرسم العثماني بلا إعجام ولا تشكيل
physically attested
The early copies record consonants only. They carry no iʿjām (the dots distinguishing letters of the same shape) and no tashkīl (vowel marks). In that script one written form can be read as several different words, which is the structural reason the canonical readings exist: they are not corruptions of a fully specified text but ways of reading a text that was never fully specified in writing.
The tradition credits Abū al-Aswad al-Duʾalī with vowel marking and Naṣr b. ʿĀṣim and Yaḥyā b. Yaʿmar with the pointing of letters, under the governor al-Ḥajjāj b. Yūsuf. Roughly seventy years separate ʿUthmān's recension from a script that specifies which word is written.
Printing
The Arabic text was first printed in Europe by Abraham Hinckelmann at Hamburg in 1694, and with a Latin translation and refutation by Ludovico Marracci at Padua in 1698.
The first printing under Muslim auspices was produced at St Petersburg in 1787 under Catherine II, followed by the Kazan editions. Printing had been resisted for the Qurʾānic text long after it was accepted for other books.
Modern standard
A commission at al-Azhar produced the edition that became the worldwide standard. It fixed one reading — Ḥafṣ ʿan ʿĀṣim — as the printed text, settled the verse numbering on the Kufan count, and regularised the orthography. It was compiled from the recitation tradition and the works on readings and verse-counting rather than from old manuscripts, and earlier copies were reportedly withdrawn and destroyed. The text most readers today call the Qurʾān is this edition: it is 1,292 years later than the traditional date of the last revelation.
The King Fahd Complex opened at Madinah in 1985 and its muṣḥaf, following the Cairo text, is now the most widely distributed printed Qurʾān in the world. The Complex also publishes editions in the other transmissions, which is what makes a comparison like the one on this site possible at all.