Quran pages

These pages of an anonymous and undated Quran are bound with pages of other Qurans of the same size. They all belong to a collection compiled in Egypt and acquired by the Bibliothèque nationale in 1833. On these pages, there are passages from various suwar[1]. The calligraphy used is Kufic; diagonal lines, gold, red and green dots, mark the diacritic characters, the vocalisation and the hamza. All these elements correspond to the system codified by Abu Al-Aswad Al-Du’ali (d. 688). The verses are separated by golden rosettes, the groups of five verses are  marked by the golden letter "ha’ ", and the groups of ten verses are indicated by circular medallions with a golden letter indicating the numbering. On page 13 v°, the title of the sura, al-Najm (the star) is written in gold, surrounded by a band of the same colour to which is connected a vignette decorated with flourishes in the margin.

According to F. Déroche, the script belongs to a type in usage throughout the Muslim world from the first half of the ninth to the first half of the tenth century. Recent studies have preferred the appellation "ancient Abbasid writing" to that of "Kufic", because it corresponds better to a large number of scripts, differentiated mostly by the size of the letters. However, to date, the regional styles of this period cannot be identified with any great precision. It was only in the tenth century that a break between the Orient and the Muslim Occident (Maghreb and Spain) occurred, at the time of the dismantling of the Abbasid Empire in independent or semi-independent regions.

Used for many centuries in the Orient before the Arab conquest, parchment, an expensive but reusable material, was preferred over paper for illuminated copies of the Quran up to the tenth century. However, it continued to be used longer in the Maghreb[2]. The extension of the titles with a vignette decorated with flourishes or palmettes in the margin is a recurrent pattern in the Qurans of this period, as demonstrated by many examples, conserved, among other places, at the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and in the collection of the Great Mosque of Sanaa in Yemen. They would be of Byzantine origin.

A note in cursive script indicating that the manuscript was constituted as waqf (mortmain property or inalienable property) by a certain Al-Hasan b. ‘Ali b. Ahmad b. Ja‘far b. Abi Haram Al-Tanukhi in a mashhad (mausoleum) in Tyr may indicate that it was produced in this city. However, it is not easy to identify its place of origin because many manuscripts, similarly to precious objects, have circulated through trade and gifts. Its owner is not identified to this day, however, his nisba (genealogical name) indicates that he belonged to the Tanukh tribe. Originating from North Syria, the latter was encouraged by the Atabeg of Damascus, for defense purposes, to establish itself in the Al-Gharb district south-east of Beirut, then just recently conquered by the Crusaders. In the sixteenth century, the Tanukh became the emirs of the region. As to the mausoleum, it is not possible to identify it as no trace of it has survived.

[1] Quran XLIX, 1-17; LII, 23; LIII, 33.

[2] From China where it is attested since the first century AD, paper seems to have been known, on the shores of the Mediterranean, from before the Arab conquest, but was not commonly used. According to the Arab chronicles, Chinese prisoners would have revealed how to make it in 751. It was first manufactured in Samarkand, then in Baghdad, and spread throughout the Islamic world before reaching Europe. The oldest known Arabic paper manuscript dates back to 866.