Gallery Text :
Folio from the “Tashkent Qur’an”,late 8th to 9th century
Magnificent in size, this folio comes from one of the oldest surviving Qur’an manuscripts in existence. It is written in an early version of the kufic script with no diacritical marks to distinguish the letters, and with very limited illumination. Based on the form of the script, and the illuminations that do survive on other pages from this Qur’an, the book has been attributed to Cairo, Egypt; Damascus, Syria; or Sana’a, Yemen. About one third of the original manuscript is housed in the Hast-Imam Library in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.
