Origins — from Jazm to the first pens

Arabic writing grew out of the Nabataean script of the caravan towns of Petra and Hegra. Inscriptions from the 3rd to the 6th century show its letters turning, step by step, into Arabic. When the Qur'an was revealed and written down, scribes in Mecca and Medina copied it on parchment in an upright, slightly sloping hand; Ibn al-Nadim called these hands Makki and Madani, and modern scholars call them Hijazi. The pen was a cut reed, and the letters carried few dots. Fixed rules of proportion came some three centuries later. But Arabic calligraphy begins here, with the care taken over the first copies of the Qur'an.

Most scholars trace the Arabic letters to the script of the Nabataeans, the trading kingdom of Petra and Hegra. An older view derived them from Syriac, and a few still hold it. G. J. Klehr in the 18th century and Theodor Nöldeke in the 19th argued for the Nabataean line, and inscriptions found since then in Syria, Jordan and northern Arabia have persuaded most specialists.

The stones show the change in stages. A tombstone from al-Ula, dated 280, is cut in a Nabataeo-Arabic hand, halfway between the two. The epitaph of Imru' al-Qays at Namara (328) is in the Arabic language but still in Nabataean letters. At Zabad near Aleppo (512), Jabal Usays (528) and Harran south of Damascus (568), the letters can be read as Arabic.

From Nabataean the new script kept its joined letters, and with them a problem: several sounds shared one shape. Without dots, ba, ta and tha look the same, and so do nun and ya at the start or in the middle of a word. Dots to tell such letters apart appear early, but scribes used them sparingly for a long time.

Arab historians tell the story through people. In accounts gathered later, writing reached Mecca from al-Hira and al-Anbar in Iraq; Harb ibn Umayya and Bishr ibn Abd al-Malik are among those named as the first to bring it. The reports disagree on who came first, and modern historians read them with caution.

Turkish scholarship describes two early manners. Jazm was upright, angular and regular. Mashq was rounder and quicker, used for letters and trade. Because jazm was steadier, it was chosen for copying the Qur'an, while the rounder hand served daily life and later fed the cursive scripts.

In the 10th century the bibliographer Ibn al-Nadim, who had seen early copies, called the Qur'an hands of Mecca and Medina Makki and Madani. Their alif, he noted, leans slightly to the right and ends in a small hook. Modern scholars group these hands as Hijazi, a term coined by Michele Amari in the 19th century; the most slanted of them is called ma'il, 'sloping'.

Muslim tradition holds that the revelations, received between 610 and 632, were kept first in memory and on scattered materials, gathered into one book under Abu Bakr, and fixed in a standard copy under Uthman around 650.

The surviving manuscripts sit close to that account. In 2015 the University of Birmingham had two parchment leaves from its Mingana Collection radiocarbon-tested in Oxford: the skin dates to between 568 and 645, with 95.4 per cent probability. The test dates the animal, not the moment of writing. Larger early copies survive in Paris and St Petersburg, and in London, where the British Library's ma'il Qur'an (Or. 2165) keeps 121 leaves of the 8th century, more than two thirds of the text.

These books are written on parchment in brown-black ink, on upright pages. Their letters carry few dots or none. Verse ends are marked with small dashes, six in two stacks of three in the London copy.

The Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik (r. 685–705) made Arabic the public face of the state. The Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem carries a long inscription in early angular script in gold mosaic, dated 72 AH (691–692).

Coins followed. After a few years of gold coins showing a standing caliph, his mint struck in 77 AH (696–697) the first dinars with Arabic words only: on one face the profession of faith and part of a verse of Sura al-Tawba, on the other the first three verses of Sura al-Ikhlas with the year. Around 700 Arabic replaced Greek in the government offices of Syria; al-Hajjaj had already begun the same change from Persian in Iraq.

Two gaps remained: letters that shared a shape, and short vowels that were not written. Dots that tell letters apart appear already in PERF 558, the oldest dated Arabic papyrus: a receipt in Greek and Arabic for sheep handed over to Arab troops at Heracleopolis in Egypt, dated Jumada I of the year 22, April 643. Its scribe dotted jim, kha, dhal, zay, shin and nun.

For the vowels, tradition names Abu al-Aswad al-Du'ali of Basra, who marked them with red dots: one above the letter for a, one below for i, one in front of the letter for u, two for tanwin. Some accounts tie the work to Ziyad ibn Abihi, governor of Basra. In the 8th century the grammarian al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi (d. 786 or 791; sources differ) replaced the dots with small signs, the ancestors of today's fatha, damma and kasra.

Begin with the slant. On a Hijazi page the tall letters lean to the right and the alif often ends in a short hook. The lines are not ruled. Then find the verse marks: groups of small dashes or oblique strokes, and sometimes a circle for every tenth verse.

Then look at colour. Red dots are vowels, not letters. Titles in another ink were often added afterwards: on a Paris leaf (BnF Arabe 334) the name of Sura al-Ra'd and its verse count were written after its last verse, above the band that opens the next sura.

These pages are for reading, not copying. Their proportions were not yet fixed; that came three centuries later, with Ibn Muqla. To learn to write, begin with naskh, then come back to these leaves to train the eye.