The lecture aims at reconsider some early Qurʾanic parchment scrolls found in the Qubbat al-khazna in Damascus and currently preserved in Istanbul, at the Musuem of Turkish and Islamic Arts. The production of Greek-Byzantine Christian scrolls from Damascus and Bilād al-Shām provide us with the opportunity to take a fresh look at these early Qurʾanic scrolls, offering useful comparanda as regards both the book form and the text typology. In the light of Greek and Greek-Arabic hymnographic scrolls, it seems plausible to link early Qurʾanic scrolls only attested in Islamic book production through the Qubbat al-khazna material to Christian-Byzantine book production in Greek from Damascus and Bilād al-Shām area between the 8th and the 10th century AD.
Associate Professor of Arabic Language and Literature at Sapienza-University of Rome, Junior Fellow at the Sapienza School for Advanced Studies (SSAS: 2014-2017; 2017-2020) and Corresponding member of the Académie Royale des Sciences d'Outre-Mer (Bruxelles). In 2018 she was awarded with the Samir Shamma Prize of the Royal Numismatic Society (London). Numismatic consultant for the Qatar National Museum (QNM, Doha Oct 2021-Jan 2022), she is currently Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES), Berkeley (Jan-May 2022).
Her main fields of research are: Arabic manuscripts (palaeography, codicology, edition of texts), Arabic Papyrology and Numismatics.
