NEAR EAST, 11TH CENTURY

Details

QUR'AN SECTION
NEAR EAST, 11TH CENTURY
Arabic manuscript on heavy buff paper, 28ff. plus 2 fly-leaves, each folio with 5ll. of bold black Eastern kufic, gold and polychrome rosette, drop-shaped or trilobe markers in text, gold and polychrome marginal 'ashr and khams medallions, sura headings in gold on blue outlined panels of gold scrolls issuing medallions into the margins, some staining, small repairs, later owner's comments in one margin, in brown morocco with stamped medallion containing stellar motif, paper doublures
Folio 7 1/8 x 5 1/8in. (18.1 x 13cm.)

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Lot Essay

This Qur'an is written in very elegant eastern kufic - a script, generally associated with Iran, which was prevalent between the 9th and 11th centuries. The development of this script coincided with the change from the horizontal format to the vertical format and also with the change from vellum to paper. Sheila Blair comments that the most striking of the Qur'an manuscripts copied in Eastern kufic are often multi-volume codices of relatively small size with only 4-5 lines of script per page (Sheila S. Blair, Islamic Calligraphy, Edinburgh, 2008, p. 197). This may originally have been part of such a manuscript.

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