Kufic script

Maryam Ekhtiar counts the rise of kufic in the late seventh to early eighth century, and its spread, as a major development in the history of Islamic calligraphy. The name comes from Kufa, but it denotes a category of angular scripts with many variations, not necessarily a place of production. ¹

Kufic followed precise rules for calibrated letters with geometric proportion and regularity, and so replaced hijazi as the preferred script for copying the Qur'an, a status it kept until about the mid- to late tenth century. ¹ It is marked by clarity, generous spacing and the horizontal extension of letters along the baseline. ¹ The earliest dinars, dated 76 AH/696–97 CE, bear Qur'anic verses in an early formal kufic ¹; see Qur'anic inscriptions on coins and the coinage reform. A dated architectural example is the inscription around the ambulatory of the Dome of the Rock, 72 AH/691–92 CE. ¹

Qur'ans of the eighth to tenth centuries were mostly written on parchment, in vertical, square and oblong formats; from the second half of the eighth century the oblong format with a few lines a page became standard. Most early kufic Qur'ans were built of quinions — quires of five folded sheets — bound in leather and kept in chests. ¹ A bifolium from an Abbasid Qur'an at The Met carries seven lines of bold kufic; the horizontal stretching of letters may also have signalled the reciter to prolong a letter or word, vowels are red or green dots, and consonant points are largely absent. ² Once the new style and the rounded scripts took over, kufic was confined to ornament such as sura headings. ³