Sana'a: City of the Book
Since its discovery in Yemen in 1972 a collection of brittle documents, believed to be among the earliest Koranic texts, has been the subject of fierce and divisive debate among scholars of Islamic history, as Scott MacMillan reports.
From the outside Yemen’s House of Manuscripts looks more like a jail than a library. Built in the early 1980s to house Yemen’s vast collection of medieval Islamic writing, the boxy structure stands surrounded by barbed wire and is incongruously devoid of charm amid the cobbled warrens and ancient tower houses of Sana’a, one of the world’s oldest continually inhabited cities. The Grand Mosque next door is thought to contain architectural traces of the mosque erected on this site by order of the Prophet Muhammad himself. The drab appearance of the House of Manuscripts belies the significance of what lies within.
This article is available to History Today online subscribers only. If you are a subscriber, please log in.
Please choose one of these options to access this article:
- Purchase a online subscription and receive unlimited access to our archive for one week, one month or a year
- Purchase a print and website subscription, giving you one year's access to all our content and 12 editions of History Today magazine.
- If you are already a print subscriber, purchase the online archive upgrade for a year's worth of access at a reduced price
Call our Subscriptions department on +44 (0)20 3219 7813 for more information.
If you are logged in but still cannot access the article, please contact us
If you enjoyed this article, you might like these:
- Home
- Location
- Period
- Themes
- Magazine
- Subscribe
- Archive
- Ebooks
- Students
- Blogs
- Contact
Newsletter
From The Current Issue
|
Roger Hudson
|
|
Nicola Phillips
|
|
Nicholas Mee
|
|
Anthony Kelly
|
From The Archive
|
The Hudson's Bay Company was one of the central forces moulding the development of the vast tracts of land that today are Canada - but as Barry Gough explains here, the circumstances of its launch in 1670 also reveal much about the commercial forces, personalities and rivalries of Restoration England. |
On This Day In History
Richard Cavendish describes the massacre of the 'slave hounds' at the settlement of Pottawatomie Creek on May 24th, 1856.





















