Certain outliers were noticed and discarded (Sanaa Unified Kiel is too early, Sanaa fol11 too late). The remaining samples are treated as if they are all elements of one archeological phase, and modelled in Oxford’s Oxcal 4.4 model software.

Resulting dating calculations are the following:

1. Note that the new Oxcal20 calibration curve has been used. Steep slopes give the most precise results. Regrettably, the Oxcal20 curve has “a bump” for the early 7th C which makes narrow date ranges less easily obtainable. Example: Birmingham

1. The above Birmingham example shows that through the combination of the different samples in the model, the date range is narrowed down (dark gray compared with light gray). Hereunder are the modelled results for fol4313:

1. Oxcal provides the functions First() and Last() to interrogate the surrounding group of the phase. The result of the query gives probability of the date of the first and then last item of the group.

Thus we can conclude that there is an 85% probability that at least one of these samples of Qur’anic manuscripts dates back to before 622 AD.