What art was for

This lesson asks you to explain the functions of different kinds of art works in past and present societies. The museum offers three cases from Islamic history where writing served a purpose, in sacred texts, on coins and on city walls; present-day cases come from your class. ¹

For each record, name the people who would have seen the work and the places where they met it. Say what the maker or patron wanted them to do or feel, and mark what is only your guess.

Sort the three cases by function: sacred, official, commemorative or another. Then ask which of those jobs a work of art still does today.

Look at what one kind of writing was made to do. 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 ². Most Qur'ans of the eighth to tenth centuries were written on parchment, and from the second half of the eighth century the oblong format with a few lines a page became standard ². 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 ³. Once the rounded scripts took over, kufic was confined to ornament such as sura headings ⁴.

The name suggests a place of making. Maryam Ekhtiar writes that it comes from Kufa, but that it denotes a category of angular scripts with many variations, not necessarily a place of production ².

The record gives two dated cases in kufic. The earliest dinars, dated 76 AH/696–97 CE, bear Qur'anic verses in an early formal kufic, and the inscription around the ambulatory of the Dome of the Rock is dated 72 AH/691–92 CE ². Both come from one handbook, Ekhtiar's How to Read Islamic Calligraphy, published by The Met in 2018. Her point about the stretched letters is hedged ("may also have signalled"), so treat it as a reading, not a fact.

The record says kufic was the preferred script for Qur'ans until about the tenth century and was later confined to ornament. Give a reason, and answer the objection that ornament is also a job: did the script lose its job, or change its job?

• Kufic script: how the script was built and how Qur'ans in it were made.
• Propaganda coins: coins that carried a message in writing.
• Aqmar Mosque: the Cairo facade where the chapter finds a full scheme of inscriptions.

Read the records on propaganda coins and Kufic script. Choose one inscription or coin and write two sentences on who was meant to read it and what it was meant to do.