A Qur'an bifolium in Kufic script on vellum, North Africa or Near East, 9th century

text: Qur'an, surah Hud, end of verse 64 to middle of verse 68; start of verse 38 beginning of verse 41

Arabic manuscript on vellum, 5 lines to the page written in Kufic script in dark brown ink, diacritics in red and green, verses separated by gold florets, khams marked by a gold ha', 'ashr marked by a gold illuminated roundel

12.8 by 39.5cm.

The earliest Qur’ans were copied in the Hijazi script but in the Umayyad period Qur’an production shifted to a new aesthetic. Qur’ans were primarily written in a script known as ‘Kufic’, which was underpinned by strict geometric principles. Multiple iterations of Kufic were developed concurrently across a vast geography and the resulting corpus of manuscripts copied in Kufic shows great variety in the style of script, scale and illumination.