MORE ON THE PARIS EXHIBITION: Reader Tommy Wasserman points me to the website for the Books of Words: Torah, Bible, Koran (Torah, Bible, Coran: Livres de parole) exhibition at http://expositions.bnf.fr/parole/index.htm. There's lots of interesting stuff. The only Dead Sea Scroll I can find is a fragment of Leviticus written in the paleo-Hebrew script. There is mention of a Samuel manuscript as well, but it doesn't seem to be pictured. Here is a polyglot Bible. Here are images of a couple of Jewish amulets. Here is an illustration of a Josephus manuscript depicting the construction of the Jerusalem Temple. Here are pages from a Coptic Gospel of John. Here are images of New Testament manuscripts in Syriac and Ethiopic. And here is a very early (7th century) manuscript of the Qur'an. (Click on the smaller photos to enlarge them and get more explanatory text.) And there's much more. If all this is in the exhibit, it's quite an impressive one.

UPDATE (9 January): There are several Qumran fragments here. Three of them look like they belong to the Leviticus scroll, but the one on the upper left is in the square script and must be from a different manuscript.

UPDATE: Speaking of Quranic manuscripts, here's a BBC article on what it says is the oldest surviving copy of the Qur'an, dating to 651 CE, only 19 years after the death of Muhammad. It is housed in a library in Uzbekistan.

(Via Archaeologica News.)

UPDATE (11 January): David Nishimura has more on that early Qur'an and related matters over at Cronaca.