AN EARLY KUFIC QURAN SECTION, NEAR EAST OR NORTH... Lot 1

AN EARLY KUFIC QURAN SECTION, NEAR EAST OR NORTH AFRICA, 8TH CENTURY Qur’an XVIII. Sura al-Kahf vv.57part-vv.70part Qur’an XIX. sura al-Maryam vv.39part-vv.53part Arabic text on vellum, 2ff., each with 15ll. of black Kufic script, diacritics in red, gold and polychrome roundel verse margins, stylised gold ‘ha corresponds every fifth verse outlined with black, The body of the text is written in an early Abbasid script which according to Francois Déroche’s classification system can be described as ‘B.II’. Though this script was described as ‘iraqi by the Austrian orientalist Josef von Karabacek in 1918, its discovery in manuscript caches from places as diverse as Damascus, Sanaa, Cairo and Kairouan suggests that it was in use across the Abbasid world. The manuscripts found in Damascus yielded a pair of dated examples: one was written in AH 229 / 843-4 AD, the other Safar AH 249 / April 863 AD (F. Déroche, The Abbasid Tradition, Oxford, 1992, p. 36). Though the present lot is undated, the sura headings in a D.IV script suggest that it was probably written in the late ninth or tenth century. Property of a Lady