A ornamented miniature Qur’an from the time of the Seljuk dynasty in Iraq was sold at Sotheby’s auction in London, the capital of the British Empire, for 138,600 pounds, which is equal to 3,709,440 Egyptian pounds.
The Qur’an was introduced by the auction house as part of the auction that I organised called “The Arts of the Islamic and Indian World,” along with Islamic manual carpets and many paper manuscripts and Qur’ans that were all different in terms of form and design. The estimated price range for the Qur’an ranged from 50,000 to 80,000 pounds.
The Qur’an has 284 sheets, each of which has 15 lines of copy line writing in black ink, verses separated by golden fridges, and names of the Quranic fence inscribed in gold ink on black paper with a luminous framing.
The auction house explained that this copy of the Qur’an belongs to the twelfth century, between the late eleventh and early thirteenth century, and the oldest Qur’an in this method is what was formulated by Ibn al-Bawab, on 391 AH / 1000-1 AD, and it is now in the Chester Betty Library, In addition to the Qur’an of Ibn Al-Bawab, only a few Qur’ans from the eleventh century were known, one of which being the Iraqi version kept in the British Library.
In this copy, it is stated that the two poets at the time were having difficulty writing their customary circular texts into texts deserving of sacred scriptures because to the unusually small coordination of the page.
One of the characteristics of the earliest connected Qurans is the ornamentation in hues of dark brown, golden, and blue.
It appears that this characteristic is borrowed from the Kufi Qur’an’s facades because the interlocking circle opening ornamentation is also found on the Ibn Al-Bawab Qur’an and a Qur’an from the Al-Khalili group from the eleventh century.
Selling a Qur’an for almost 4 million pounds at an international auction
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