Enrica Medugno
Senior Sale Coordinator
Lot 1R
Two conjoined leaves from a Qur'an written in eastern kufic script Persia or Mesopotamia, 11th-12th Century
22 May 2025, 11:00 BST
London, New Bond Street£6,000 - £8,000
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Oliver White
Head of Department
Two conjoined leaves from a Qur'an written in eastern kufic script
Persia or Mesopotamia, 11th-12th Century
Persia or Mesopotamia, 11th-12th Century
Arabic manuscript on paper, one leaf mounted above the other, each with 17 lines of text in eastern kufic script in black ink with diacritics in black ink, vowel points in red, with gold roundel verse markers outlined in black, gold and polychrome illuminated marginal medallions cut out and laid down at top and bottom, probably from the original manuscript
total visible dimensions 610 x 222 mm.
total visible dimensions 610 x 222 mm.
Footnotes
Provenance
Christie's South Kensington, Arts and Textiles of the Islamic and Indian Worlds, 10th October 2014, lot 255.
Text
Qur'an, sura III, al-'Umran, verses 116-133.
Two leaves from the same Qur'an are in the Nasser D. Khalili Collection (see F. Déroche, The Abbasid Tradition, Oxford 1992, pp. 178-179, no. 95). He classifies and discusses the script as New Style 1 (op. cit., pp. 132-135). The two Khalili leaves have been modified in a similar fashion to our leaves: juxtaposed, with marginal medallions trimmed from their original positions and applied to the upper and lower margins and which suggests that they come from the same source.
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