Thread : The Qur’ān and the birth of the Landscape format.
1/12. Most of the Qur’ān manuscripts written in Kufic are wider than they are high. Today, we’re quite ‘familiar’ with the landscape format. But from a Late Antique perspective, a horizontal codex was totally unknown!
1/12. Most of the Qur’ān manuscripts written in Kufic are wider than they are high. Today, we’re quite ‘familiar’ with the landscape format. But from a Late Antique perspective, a horizontal codex was totally unknown!
2/12. Since the birth of the codex in the 3rd/4th CE, codices are always vertical or square (illustration: early Coptic codices). There is NO horizontal -or oblong- codex. So, when and why our Qur'ān scribes/craftsmen decided some day to transform the shape of their Sacred Book?
3/12. Contrary to the common belief: early Qur’āns are not always vertical. In the Damascus collection, there are some small early fragments in oblong format. For Déroche, these "are more difficult to date : some may be dated to the 7th century" But material evidence is barely…
4/12. The corpus of oblong Qur’āns, still small-size, expands when we consider more professional scripts, mixing features of hijazi and early angular scripts. These are maybe slightly later. We have more materials, found in the 4 deposits : Kairouan, Fusṭāṭ, Damascus and Ṣan‘ā
5/12. The oblong manuscripts become predominant with proper angular scripts. Their dimensions also vary from very small to very large. There are of course some exceptions (esp. Kufic D.V). But the vertical format will definitely come back with the New Style in Middle-East.
6/12. Why inventing the oblong format ? According to Safadi, in 1978, it’s linked with the horizontal elongations occuring in Kufic scripts. But his explanation is now outdated, as we know oblong materials in Hijazi script..
7/12. Déroche assumed (at least 16 years ago) that the shift from vertical to oblong format was for preventing confusion between the Qur’ān and another book, whether it is the Bible or the Hadith.
8/12. In 2006, S. Blair assigned it to "a different center or school, or different period or both"…using oblong for "practical reasons: this shape (which is the same but rotated 90°) makes the most of the animal skin".
9/12. Lastly, A. George considered the oblong format as a Kufic attribute. If oblong format is used with hijazi script, as for Codex Amrensis 1, that means a "conscious reference to the hijazi past", reflecting probably "the ethos of religiously conservative circles".
10/12. All of these explanations don’t really focus on the birth of the oblong format. I recently studied new materials from Fustat. My suggestion is that the oblong format arose in the same milieu than the vertical, maybe because of economic constraints.
11/12. Based on this material evidence, I don’t consider early oblong format as "the same shape [as the vertical] but rotated 90°". I see them as half of the vertical format. Simply because copyists cut their vertical bifolios in the middle for obtaining 4 folios instead of 2.
12/12. Could this be generalized to other materials? As for now, the small-size of the early oblong mss agrees with my hypothesis. There are also many other questions. Were these volumes used for other purposes ? Above all, why they became the standard in the later production ?
