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A Unique and Early Use of Micrographic Carpet Page Format 23*

commentary, to make the scribe’s work more interesting, or both. It was also
employed in the copying of lengthy masoretic lists into carpet pages at the
ends of such codices (“cumulative masorah”).

Because of its origins in a genre centered on the biblical text, it is
understandable that one also finds carpet pages at the beginning or end of
Bible codices which contain dedications or colophons. Micrographic texts on
these pages contain verses. This is an extension of the masoretic/scriptural
origin of micrography, for the Masorah consists mainly of biblical quotations
and references.

The earliest extant biblical codices containing micrography in the Masorah
and in carpet pages date from the tenth century.25 They are so elaborately and

MicrographyMahzor, MS8° 6527 in theJewishNaional and UniversityLibrary inJerusalem
(Ph.D. dissertation, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2008).
25 Avrin (n. 19 above), p. 45, dates its first appearance to the Moshe ben Asher Bible
codex, 895 CE (and she notes, on p. 46, there that there are no precedents for such a
form in Christian or Muslim MSS). However, since the colophon in this codex does not
reflect the text, and is therefore a forgery (see C. Sirat et al., Codices hebraicis litteris
exarati quo tempore scripti fuerint exhibentes [Turnhout, Paris and Jerusalem ca. 1997],
vol. 1, pp. 28-29), the first known instances must be dated to tenth-century Bible codices
also described and imaged in that volume. D. R. Halperin cites the correct early tenth
century date in Illuminating in Micrography (n. 24 above), vol. 1, p. 14. S. Blair, Islamic
Calligraphy (Edinburgh 2006) suggests that “since many features ofthe Hebrew manuscript
... derive from Koranic traditions, it seems likely that Hebrew micrography also derived
from examples in Arabic manuscripts that have not survived” (p. 473, n. 20). This, an
argument from silence, while impossible to prove or disprove, fails to convince, since there
is no evidence for it in the many Koran MSS that have survived from the tenth century,
nor in the earlier ones (see, e.g., the many examples in F. Deroche, TheAbbasid tradition:
Qur 'ans ofthe 8th to the 10th centuries [The Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art, v.
1], (London and New York ca. 1992). Moreover, Korans produced by trained scribes may
be the wrong place to look for precedents, as they follow conventions that minimize the
placing of auxiliary text (commentaries and related traditions) on the same page as the main
text, as opposed to more popular productions that included related texts. In any event, just
as we find micrography continuing to be employed in Hebrew manuscripts in succeeding
centuries, and branching out in new ways as well, we would expect to see later examples and
developments in Arabic scribal decoration that would imply the existence of earlier stages
of micrographic creativity. Arabic micrography, however, only appears much later. Blair