Illuminated Numbers
My posts tend to be quite long and I know it’s hard to keep up with everything that lands in the inbox, so from time to time I’m sending a purely visual newsletter. Today is a collection of verse markers from a ninth-century Qur’an1.
In the early days of the Islamic scribal tradition, verse markers injected rare notes of colourful decoration into otherwise sober volumes. Here, the markers for 1 and 5 verses are always the same design, but each of the rest is unique or very nearly, as the number is spelled out inside the freestyling rosette. I like to think someone had a lot of fun imagining and painting them. The series ends with a beautiful prostration marker, placed conspicuously well outside the text box.
One
Five ه
Ten عشر
Twenty عشرون
Thirty ثلثون
Forty اربعون
Fifty خمسون
Sixty ستون
Seventy سبعون
Eighty ثمنون
One hundred مائة
One hundred and sixty مائة ستون
One hundred and seventy مائة سبعون
Two hundred and sixty مائتان ستون
Prostration سجدة
Folios of this manuscript are kept in different collections:
Bibliothèque Nationale de France: BnF MS. Arabe 350;
Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford: MS. Marsh 178;
Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel: Wolfen. Cod. Guelf. 12.11 Aug. 2°;
Chester Beatty Library, Dublin: CBL Is 1407.
The folios can all be seen in one place in this digital musḥaf (more info here). The close-ups in this article are taken from the BnF and Bodleian folios.