A KUFIC QUR'AN SECTIONNEAR EAST OR NORTH AFRICA, 8TH/9TH CENTURYA KUFIC QUR'AN SECTIONNEAR EAST OR NORTH AFRICA, 8TH/9TH CENTURYArabic text on vellum, 162ff. each with 16ll. of black kufic with red diacritics, sura headings in gold, small gold and polychrome roundel verse markers, margins slightly trimmed, unboundEach folio approximately 10 1/8 x 7 5/8in. (25.7 x 19.5cm.)While most kufic manuscripts have been broken up and survive only as single folios or short sections, the length of this section - produced only around three centuries after the death of the Prophet - makes it a real rarity. As well as its length, what makes the present lot unusual is the fact that so many of the folios follow on from one another: 127 of the folios are in continuous sections, the longest of which covers the entirety of the tenth juz’. The folios also contain 19 sura headings, rendered in gold ink. The whole manuscript is realised in an elegant kufic script, the extraordinary consistency of which can only be fully appreciated when a large number of folios from a single manuscript are viewed at once. The body of the text is written in an early Abbasid script which according to Francois Déroche’s classification system can be described as ‘B.II’. Though this script was described as ‘iraqi by the Austrian orientalist Josef von Karabacek in 1918, its discovery in manuscript caches from places as diverse as Damascus, Sanaa, Cairo and Kairouan suggests that it was in use across the Abbasid world. The manuscripts found in Damascus yielded a pair of dated examples: one was written in AH 229 / 843-4 AD, the other Safar AH 249 / April 863 AD (F. Déroche, The Abbasid Tradition, Oxford, 1992, p. 36). Though the present lot is undated, the sura headings in a D.IV script suggest that it was probably written in the late ninth or tenth century. B.II script is distinguished by the strictly vertical upward strokes on letters like alef or ta’, and with long elegant curves on initial ha', and final ‘ayn and qaaf. The is also distinctive because of the long descender which the scribe has added to final ya’, which loops back on itself and sometimes underlines the preceding words. The stark appearance of the script, together with the fact that it often appears on folios as small as 15x20cm, has led to the suggestion that it was favoured by more conservative patrons (A. George, The Rise of Islamic Calligraphy, London, 2010, p. 92). However, this is hard to reconcile with the use of gold throughout this manuscript, which such a patron would not have condoned. Instead, the patron may have opted for this particular script because of the clarity with which it demonstrates the geometric properties of kufic. Kufic calligraphy was organised according to mathematical principles which constructed a page based on a proportional relationship between its elements. On this manuscript, the height of each untrimmed folio is approximately equal to the width of each text panel. The height of each text panel is exactly three quarters of that value, and if that value is divided by the number of lines per folio (in this case, sixteen) it gives the exact measurement of the height of an alef. In this way, the height of a single letter, scrupulously maintained by the scribe throughout the manuscript despite the parchment being unruled, determines every other element. The skill on display here is a testament to the years of training received by the scribe at a time when the art of calligraphy reached unprecedented heights of perfection. Other examples of B.II manuscripts can be found in the Khalili collection (Deroche, 1992, pp.54-57). Folios which appear to come from the same manuscript as the present lot have been sold in these Rooms, 26 April 2012, lot 112, and 28 October 2020, lot 59. For a full list of the suras included in this section, please refer to the department.细节 A KUFIC QURAN SECTIONNEAR EAST OR NORTH AFRICA, 8TH/9TH CENTURYArabic text on vellum, 162ff. each with 16ll. of black kufic with red diacritics, sura headings in gold, small gold and polychrome roundel verse markers, margins slightly trimmed, unboundEach folio approximately 10 1/8 x 7 5/8in. (25.7 x 19.5cm.) 来源 Michel Abemayor (1912-1975), New York 注意事项 This lot has been imported from outside of the UK for sale and placed under the Temporary Admission regime. Import VAT is payable at 5% on the hammer price. VAT at 20% will be added to the buyer’s premium but will not be shown separately on our invoice.