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

Of these two folios, the smaller is written in the D.IV style which was discussed in the note accompanying lot 2. The larger folio is written in D.I, and comparing them allows the differences to be drawn out between the scripts within the ‘D’ subgroup of kufic : independent alif is more definitely hooked upwards; mim and ha’ sit flat on the line and barely dip beneath it. Generally, D.I is a more luxurious script, taking up more space on the page and meaning that an entire Qur’an written with it would have occupied many more pages, and consequently been far more expensive. Like D.IV, examples are found from across the Abbasid world and bear dates ranging from the 9^th to the 10^th centuries, including the ‘Qur’an of Amajur’, which is dated to AH 262/875-6 AD and known to have been endowed to a mosque in Tyre by the then-governor of Damascus. A folio, apparently from the same manuscript as the larger folio in this lot, is in the Khalili Collection (Francois Déroche, The Abbasid Tradition, Oxford, 1992, p.69, cat.21). Another was part of the Lygo Collection, and Will Kwiatkowski references two further folios in the Musée des arts islamiques in Qairouan (Will Kwiatkowski, Pages of the Qur’an: the Lygo Collection, London, 2006, p.47, cat.22).