Arabic palaeography

The paper aims at presenting a brief overview of the discipline. Starting from the first inscriptions in Arabic language and script, the paper goes on illustrating the wide area encompassed by the discipline. Arabic Palaeography is indeed involved in many specialized disciplines like: Papirology, Numismatics, Epigraphy etc. The comparative study of written documents is essential to researches devoted to Arabic Palaeography. After a summary of the various technical terms adopted in different fields to describe the same type of script, the paper focuses on the scripts employed in manuscripts - especially Qur'ans - ending with a mention of how script is described in catalogues of Arabic manuscripts.