NEAR EAST OR NORTH AFRICA, 9TH/10TH CENTURY

This impressive folio is executed in a strong kufic script which conforms most closely with the ‘D’ family of scripts as categorised by Francois Déroche (Déroche, The Abbasid Tradition, Oxford, 1992, p.17). This is the largest and most varied ‘family’ of kufic scripts which Déroche identifies, and is divided up into further subcategories of which our manuscript seems closest to D.Va with the addition of a distinctive ‘thread-like tail’ on final mim. Though examples of this script have been found in the Qur’an caches of Qairouan, Damascus, Sana’a, and Cairo – making it hard to attribute the group to a particular region – there is a manuscript in Istanbul written in this script with a waqf inscription dated to Jumada II AH 299/January-February 912 AD, giving a terminus antequem for that manuscript and helping to contextualise the group as a whole (Déroche, op.cit., p.37). The remarkable thing about our particular folio is its size, making it part of one of the largest kufic folios to have been published.

It is possible to divide large kufic manuscripts into three groups. The first of these, and probably the earliest, were written using the ‘C’ script according to Déroche’s classification. Probably the most famous manuscript from this group is the Great Umayyad Codex of Sana’a, noted for its architectural illumination (Dar al-Makhtuttat, Sana’a, DAM 20-33.1). That manuscript has 20 lines to a page, and the largest fragments measure around 51 x 47cm. Similar examples include folios in Sana’a (IN 01-29.2 and IN 20-19.18); in the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin (acc.no.1404); and fragments in the Bibliothèque Nationale Française, Paris (Arabe 324.c) and the University of Chicago (acc.no.830). Alain George argues that these manuscripts were produced in the early years of Umayyad caliphate, around the time when al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf is recorded to have circulated copies of the Qur’an around the major cities of the caliphate (Alain George, The Rise of Islamic Calligraphy, London, 2010, p.86). Supporting this early date is the fact that all of them were written on vertical pages, like early Hijazi manuscripts, or indeed pre-Islamic codices. These earliest monumental folios established the tradition of which our folio forms a part, but are quite different from it from a codicological point of view.

The second group are likely later in date, and are written with a larger format ‘D’ style script. It includes celebrated manuscripts like the ‘Tashkent’ Qur’an, most of which is now in the Hast-Imam Library of Tashkent (acc.no.1), and the ‘Qur’an of Uthman’ in the Dar al-Kuttub in Cairo (acc.no.534). These manuscripts both have 12 lines to the page and measure 68 x 53cm. and 63 x 53cm. respectively. The open script also means that both are extremely large – the Cairo manuscript has 562 folios, is 40cm. thick, and weighs 80kgs. Also considered to be in this group is a manuscript in the Topkapi Palace library (H.S.194), though a slightly smaller script and greater number of lines per page means it is not quite so large as the Cairo or Tashkent manuscripts, measuring 46 x 40cm. (Esra Gözeler (in collaboration with Tuba Karaşahin), "Istanbul, Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi: H. S. 194 [= Karatay 1]", Manuscripta Coranica [online]). The more polished script of these manuscripts makes them closer to our folio than the first group, suggesting that both groups are later in date. However, all manuscripts in the second group are much squarer than our folio.

Our folio seems to come from a third, much more poorly published, group of manuscripts. Eight folios from the manuscript have been sold at Sotheby’s London between October 2007 and April 2024, including extracts from suras XI, XII, XIII, XVI, and XVIII. The two subsequent folios to this one were sold 1 April 2009, lot 3 and 8 October 2008, lot 7. Folios from another manuscript, the pages slightly larger in size and written in Déroche’s B.1b script, were also sold Sotheby’s London between 2016 and 2022. Though the scripts on the two manuscripts are different, the sheets on both manuscripts are oriented horizontally. This brings them more in line with the majority of kufic folios produced before the 10^th century. Déroche suggests that this change might have been intended to accentuate the horizontal lines of the kufic script, or perhaps to give Qur’an manuscripts ‘an immediately recognisable shape […] so as to underline its unique status as the word of God’ (François Déroche, The Abbasid Tradition, Oxford, 1992, p.17). The shift away from a vertical to a horizontal format as seen in the evolution of monumental kufic Qur’ans therefore reflects the development of a distinctive Islamic visual identity between the 7^th and 10^th centuries.

The smaller script and greater number of lines per page may have been intended to make these manuscripts slightly less unwieldy, but also not so costly to produce - it has been estimated that the Tashkent Qur’an required the hides of almost 1,000 sheep or goats, a significant investment in a society which remained predominantly pastoral (Eleanor Cellard, ‘The Samarkand Qur’an”, in Ahmad al-Jallad and Ahab Bdaiwi (eds.), The Arabic Script and its Pasts, 2022, p.4). Nonetheless, a manuscript such as this would have still required considerable investment, and its monumental scale would have made it the centrepiece of a mosque or madrasa in the years of the Abbasid caliphs.