The Script of the Earliest Qur'ans

Kufic is the oldest formally developed family of Arabic script, angular, heavily geometric and built from strong horizontal strokes with only limited curvature, named for the city of Kufa in Iraq though its precise place of origin is debated among scholars of early Islamic writing. It is the script of the earliest substantial surviving Qur'an manuscripts, written on parchment across the first Islamic centuries, and its severe, monumental letterforms, without the diacritical vowel marks that later became standard, gave the sacred text a visual gravity distinct from the more fluid cursive scripts that eventually displaced it for everyday copying.

Because early Kufic Qur'ans carry few vowel marks and use letterforms whose vertical strokes are often indistinguishable from one another without context, reading them correctly required, and still requires for specialists studying the manuscripts today, considerable trained familiarity with the text itself, a feature scholars read as reflecting a period when Qur'anic memorisation and oral transmission still carried more authority than the written page alone, the manuscript serving trained readers as an aid to recitation already known rather than as a self sufficient text for an unfamiliar reader.