Hi All,
From the BBC article in the OP: "These tests provide a range of dates, showing that, with a probability of more than 95%, the parchment was from between 568 and 645." The key date here is not 645, but the mean between 568 and 645, which equals 606.5. There is a 50% chance of the parchment being before 606 and a 50% chance of it being after 606. This would indicate there is approximately a 53.2% chance that this parchment predates the date that is traditionally given for Mohammad beginning to write the book in 6010. We get this by dividing all the years from 568 to 609 (41 years) by the total number of years from 568 to 645 (77 years). 41/77 = 53.2% That is the percentage of the years that would predate the accepted date.
However the Koran allegedly took 20 years to writes. That would mean that any passage in the Koran has a 50% chance of being written between 610 and 620 and a 50% chance of being written after 620. If we accept this tradition, then we have all the years from 568 to 620 as going against the tradition and all the years from 620 to 645 as being correct. This means 52 of the 77 years would yield an earlier date and 52/77 = 67.5% chance of this tradition being wrong.
There are two seemingly countervailing arguments that can increase or decrease these possibilities. One is a) how quickly parchment was used after its production and the other b) is how long in time this copy is from the original.
a) Seventh century Arabia was at a subsistence standard of living and producing a parchment was a laborious process taking months to produce. It was a luxury item and would not have been produced except on demand for immediate use. In other words, nobody could afford to produce a bunch of parchments and wait for someone to come along and buy them. Rather, the person/people who would have a need for the parchment would order it produced for immediate use. This note makes it clear that there were plenty of ways to make money off of sheepskin, so unless there was a direct order placed for a parchment, it would not have been produced:
from
http://www.bradford-delong.com/2012/11/ ... tment.html
Lawrence said in reply to John Howard Brown...
Wool is not a joint product with sheepskin, since the sheep must still have its skin to produce the wool. Sheep are sheered for wool and the opportunity cost of a sheep skin is the wool production you would get from the sheep whose skin was sacrificed for learning.(In the middle ages each live sheep produced about 1.4 pounds of wool. Just a point. The skins themselves had alternative uses and weren't simply thrown away, if they were then the opportunity cost would be low. In fact the skins had a lot of uses other than books. They were used for clothes, coats,cloaks, gloves (the original chamois leather), caps, shoes, boots. blankets, and other uses. In fact sheep skin was especially valuable for cloaks and caps because it kept out the rain and snow. During the little ice age probably was much more important than books for survival, and thus even the sheepskins themselves had high opportunity costs. So the opportunity costs were actually higher, than say movies. Another example,
"The base material of those magnificent illuminated medieval manuscripts we cherish came at great cost: one particularly splendid gospel required 1,500 calfskins to make the vellum. The use of other animal hides is far from unknown. Visitors to the Kung.Biblioteket (King's Library) in Stockholm will marvel over the immense Devil's Bible (Codex Gigas, literally Giant Book) on display there, made c1325 from the skins of 160 asses."
As previously noted if this was a reused parchment (palimsest) it would have been evident and since the article does not state that it was, we can assume that it was not. Thus we can assume that the killing of the sheep occurred shortly before the parchment was written on and years did not pass. It is highly improbable (one chance in 100) that this would be the case in a subsistence culture such as the one we're dealing with. Thus the 55% chance of this manuscript predating the traditional dates for Mohammed writing the Koran remains intact.
b) While it is lovely to think that a miracle occurred and somebody copied this manuscript a few days or years after Mohammed, this very rarely happens. We most often find manuscripts that are many generations removed from the time of original authorship. Again, the chances of this manuscript being first generation written a few years or a decade or two after the original composition is small. In 99% of cases what we find are manuscripts (even the earliest manuscripts) are written decades or hundreds of years after the composition of the work. We have to assume that there is no more than a one percent chance that this is a manuscript that was produced in the years just after the composition of the Koran. Rather there is a 99% percent chance that this was copied from a manuscript that was decades after the composition of the Koran.
These factors combined, we can say that based on this carbon dating, there is at least a 53.2% chance that the Koran was written before the traditional date given for Mohammad's beginning production of it, by decades or even a century or more.
Warmly,
Jay Raskin