Leaf from a Kufic Quran, on parchment [Near East (probably Damascus, Syria), tenth century]

Leaf from an important Kufic Qur'an, in Arabic, illuminated manuscript on parchment [Near East (probably Damascus, Syria), tenth century] single leaf, single column, three lines stylised elongated kufic script, red and green dots marking vocalisation and a cluster of gold circles in a triangular shape forming the verse marker, some oxidisation from ink causing erosion to parchment, some offsetting and faint damp-staining, outer extremities a little chipped, 330 by 225 mm. Parchment was an expensive commodity in the tenth century and the production of copies of the Qu'ran using only three lines to the page would have come at a great price. This leaf is a surviving witness to a small handful of lavish three-line Qur'ans produced in the ninth and tenth centuries, the most notable of which was produced for Amajur (d. 870 AD, Abbasid military officer and Governor of Damascus in later life) and later donated to the Great Mosque of Tyre in 262 AH (867 AD). It is perhaps this connection to Amajur that coined the term 'script of the Damascus school', associated to the type of Kufic endorsed in these three-lined Qur'ans. This leaf is comparable to another in the Nasser D. Khalili collection (accession number KFQ91) using the script identified as "D.vc" by F. Déroche in The Abbasid Tradition (1992, no. 58, pp. 109).