One Name Covering Many Hands

Kufic is a convenience rather than a category. The term was applied by later scholarship to the whole family of angular scripts found in early Quran manuscripts, and those manuscripts turn out on close examination to be written in a number of distinct hands with different letter forms, proportions and conventions, produced in different places and periods. Palaeographers have therefore developed classification systems that divide the material into groups by their actual features, and the older single label survives mainly as a general term.

The early codices themselves are distinctive objects. Many are broad rather than tall, written on parchment in few lines to the page with very large letters, which makes for a book that is impressive, expensive and slow to consult. Reading such a copy is not the same activity as reading a pocket book, and the format implies a setting: a mosque, a recitation, a patron. The marking of the text developed alongside the script. Systems of coloured dots and then of strokes were introduced to record vowels and to distinguish consonants written with the same skeleton, so an early copy can be seen accumulating the apparatus that later copies take for granted.