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Wednesday, 24th January 2007 (3259 views)

The Moscow Mint has just made a Qur'an out of gold and is to keep the rarity as an artefact in one of its national colleges.

Carefully crafted by printing pages of the Islamic holy book onto gold plates, it has been such a time-consuming process than only one has been made for the moment although the Russian company WT says it will finance the manufacture of another ten copies.

Each page measures about 14 centimetres in length and ten centimetres in width.

Anatoly Bogorodsky, who is the director of the Moscow Mint, said: "The Mint has cast 163 pages with Arabian script by means of the latest Russian coinage technologies used for releasing collection items of the highest quality."

At the moment the rare artefact is being kept in St Petersburg at the Oriental Studies Institute affiliated to the Russian Academy of Sciences.

The Qur'an, or Koran, is the central religious text of Islam and is believed by Muslims to be the literal word of God, as written down by Muhammad in the seventh century.

 

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