Seven thin parchment pages from a Koran have been dated to just after the death of the Prophet Mohammed, the main academic library in Berlin which owns them said.
The fragmentary Koran is believed to be one of the oldest remaining in the world. The leaves belonged to a scholar who lived in Cairo early in the 20th century. The library purchased the German's papers after his death.
The Swiss laboratory confirmed that the radiocarbon dating shows that the parchment dates from between 606 and 652 of the modern era, or no more than 20 years after Prophet Mohammed's death in 632.
