The Origins of a Calligraphic Style

          The Kufic script, in nearly every book and art museum website I’ve thus far referenced, has been referred to as “lapidary.” Indeed, this style’s basic form makes it perfect for inscription on rocks, coins, and other non-parchment materials. The relatively simple nature of the Kufic characters may be symptomatic of the style’s age – Kufic, after all, was one of the first Arabic forms to develop. But part of me suspects there’s more to it than that. Might the style have been designed in part with the aforementioned inscriptions in mind? In order to investigate this question, my exhibit will focus on three classes of items: manuscripts, coins, and ceramics.

            The manuscripts come from a variety of time periods, and provide context for the Kufic style. Such context has potential to directly address the exhibit’s central question. If an earlier form of writing, for example, was both widespread and more ornate than the Kufic, then the Kufic style’s simplicity would have to have been intentional, and not just a product of its “primitiveness.”

The coins date from 715 to 1015 and contain Arabic inscriptions. All but one of these inscriptions could be considered Kufic, and the al-Mansur dirham from 755, with its extremely elongated letters, best typifies the form. The precise dating of these coins, and the fact that most of them contain many of the same words, allows us to directly watch the evolution of the Arabic language. A question to keep in mind, however, is the extent to which politics plays into these differences – the differences between an Umayyad and an Abbasid coin could represent change in the Arabic language over time, or it could just represent a change in court preferences.

The ceramic pieces, finally, provide a non-political example of writing on non-parchment. All three of these beautiful pieces come from the Samanid Empire. They provide a clear example of why the Kufic form was so popular in designs – the freedom it gave in elongating letters allowed for nearly unlimited flexibility.

With these objects, I will try tackling the question of why the Kufic form looks the way it looks. Note that this question raises a number of deeper, more general questions. How is a form of writing created in the first place? Is it possible for a single individual or group to “design” a form of writing? Or does writing evolve in a more piecemeal, haphazard fashion? And even if the development is haphazard, could an underlying force make the resulting form inevitable?