Koran section, Near East or North Africa, second half of 9th century Ten consecutive folios on horizontally bound parchment. Text of 9 lines per page in Arabic kufic script in sepia ink, diacritical marks marked with red or green pigments. Koran, II, 30-71. Several illuminations in the margins or body of the text in the form of rosettes or stylized letter ha, marking the separation of verses or groups of verses. Dim. folio: approx. 13 x 20 cm Spotting, foxing, ink, gilding and polychrome bleeds, some missing parts and folds. Provenance : Ader sale, Paris, May 31, 2013, lot 68. This beautiful set of consecutive pages from the same manuscript on parchment is a moving testimony to the art of the Koranic book in the Abbasid period. The angular calligraphy used here is a perfect illustration of "classical kufic", the most common script found in today's parchment fragments. It could more accurately be classified in group D III of François Déroche's classification, like the Arabic manuscript 325 j in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BNF), which has only 7 lines and a slightly larger format. For a more similar format and the same number of lines, see the Arabic manuscript 358 g from the same institution. Our set consists of a series of ten leaves, like the quires of other Abbasid manuscripts held at the BNF (such as Arabe 378 and Arabe 399), which may suggest that we are dealing with a complete quire of the original manuscript. Bibliography : Déroche, François, Catalogue des Manuscrits Arabes. Deuxième partie : Manuscrits musulmans, Tome I.1: Les manuscrits du Coran. Aux origines de la calligraphie coranique, Paris: 1983, pp 19-20, 42 - 43.