History of the Quran is the timeline and origin of the written compilations or manuscripts of the holy book of Islam, based on historical findings. It spans several centuries, and forms an important major part of the early history of Islam. While there are various proposed etymologies, one is that the word قرآن 'Quran' comes from the Arabic verb قرء 'qaraʾa' 'to read' in the verbal noun pattern فعلان 'fuʿlān', thus resulting in the meaning 'reading'. Others are that it is a name given to the book by God, without any previous etymology, that the word comes from the verb قرن 'qarana' 'to join, to yoke', referring to the gathering together of revelation, and that it comes from قرائن 'qarāʾin', the plural of a word variously translatable as 'evidence', 'yoke', 'union'. Nine out of the ten imams of recitation have it read in their tradition with a hamzah, with only Ibn Kathir's tradition excluding the letter. According to the traditional Muslim belief and Islamic scholarly accounts, the revelation of the Quran began in 610 AD when the angel Gabriel (believed to have been sent by God) appeared to Muhammad (a trader in the Western Arabian city of Mecca, which had become a sanctuary for pagan deities and an important trading center) in the cave of Hira., According to Islamic tradition, the revelations started one night during the month of Ramadan in 610 AD, when Muhammad, at the age of forty, received the first visit from the angel Gabriel, reciting to him the first verses of Surah Al-Alaq. Muslims believe that Muhammad continued to have revelations until his death in 632 AD. According to Islamic tradition, the Quran was first compiled into a comprehensive book by Abu Bakr. As the Islamic Empire began to grow, and differing recitations were heard, the rasm - or consonantal skeleton of the Quran - was compiled for uniformity in recitation under the direction of the third caliph, Uthman ibn Affan (r. 644–656 AD). For this reason, the Quran as it exists today is also known as the Uthmanic codex. According to Francis Edward Peters (1991), what was done to the Quran in the process seems to have been extremely conservative and the content was formed in a mechanical fashion to avoid redactional bias. Arabic orthography continued to develop into the second century, allowing qira'at, or variant oral readings of the rasm, to be documented in