Corpus Coranicum

Corpus Coranicum is a digital research project of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities that worked from 2007 to 2024 on the history of the text of the Qur'an: its earliest manuscripts, its readings, the texts of the world it was revealed into, and a commentary on its suras. It was led by the Arabist Angelika Neuwirth and directed by Michael Marx, and since 2025 it has continued in a registered association of its name that keeps its website online. ¹

• Manuscripta Coranica: images and data of the earliest manuscripts held in libraries around the world, with the results of radiocarbon dating of more than forty documents. ¹
• Variae Lectiones Coranicae: a database of the readings transmitted in the books of qira'at and tafsir. ¹
• Texts of the environment: Jewish, Christian and ancient Arabian texts of the period, shown for literary comparison. ¹
• Commentary: a literary and historical reading of the suras. ¹

The article reports that the project obtained photographs of Qur'anic manuscripts collected by the German Arabist Gotthelf Bergsträsser in the 1930s and long thought lost in the war, as The Wall Street Journal reported in January 2008. ¹

In October 2007 the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published an article by Schirrmacher criticising the project's approach; Marx, Neuwirth and Nicolai Sinai replied in the same paper on 6 November 2007, and Der Spiegel covered the project that month. The museum gives both views as their authors put them, without a verdict. ¹

The project is a Western academic study of the history of the text; the account of the Qur'an's collection and writing held by Sunni scholars has its own sources and records in the museum, and no Qur'anic text is typed here.

The site is at corpuscoranicum.org, and the project has the Wikidata item Q831654. ¹

• English Wikipedia, "Corpus Coranicum", revision 1365852719. ¹