[HN Gopher] Pixels in Islamic Art: Square Kufic Calligraphy (2020)
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Pixels in Islamic Art: Square Kufic Calligraphy (2020)
Author : fanf2
Score : 152 points
Date : 2025-05-05 20:42 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (uwithumlaut.wordpress.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (uwithumlaut.wordpress.com)
| ChinstrapCmnty wrote:
| Very cool!
| hnlmorg wrote:
| There's some good examples on wikipedia as well:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
|
| As someone with zero exposure to Kufic script before today, some
| of those images, and particular the circle ones in the original
| article, remind me of the London Underground "Labyrinth" mazes
| https://www.tubeopedia.co.uk/labyrinth-locations
| lproven wrote:
| > There's some good examples on wikipedia as well:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
|
| This is not the link you intended...
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Odd. It was just the wiki page for "Kufic".
| mrtksn wrote:
| Mardin Artuklu University logo is in this style:
| http://www.artuklu.edu.tr
|
| If you look closely, you should be able to see "Mardin Artuklu
| Universitesi" in the labyrinth.
| brador wrote:
| Such abstraction can be used to obfuscate information. Could they
| contain and have contained hidden messages? Hushed passwords to
| enter secret areas of the temples hidden in plain sight?
| omneity wrote:
| I always found Kufi to be a form of space-filling curves[0],
| which was the original purpose: a form of decoration that can
| fill a surface such as edges around a building[1, 2], without
| depicting humans in stone, a form of art historically forbidden
| in Islam due the prevalence of statue idolatry at the time.
| Hence the prevalence of geometry (Zellij [3]) and calligraphy
| in areas historically islamic.
|
| Hilbert curves [4] could be the substrate (the coordinate
| system), and Kufi writing could be indeed encoded information
| maybe by XORing each point between the curve and the kufi word.
|
| I'm just blabbering around. But it's difficult to disassociate
| the two in my mind.
|
| 0: https://www.shutterstock.com/image-vector/kufi-ayat-kursi-
| al...
|
| 1: https://i0.wp.com/majnouna.com/wordpress/wp-
| content/uploads/...
|
| 2:
| https://i.pinimg.com/236x/f2/f7/e9/f2f7e99d6bfe75042313adbe6...
|
| 3: https://zellige.info/
|
| 4: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Christoph-
| Schierz/publi...
| samirillian wrote:
| Just to clarify I don't think that first image is Kufic script,
| whereas the second is the shahada (author calls it the shada)
|
| I'm not sure about the 2 kinds of scripts claim, I think there
| are a few more than that.
| mda wrote:
| Not sure, I think first image is square or geometric Kufic
| (sometimes called "Satrancli Kufi" in Turkish) of course looks
| quite different than typical Kufic script.
| Calwestjobs wrote:
| Greatest shibboleths of them all.
| mohsen1 wrote:
| I had the idea of making a QR code generator that embeds those
| "Kufi" "scripts" but never got to do it. Now with LLM image
| generators it's pretty feasible
| omneity wrote:
| Worth noting that Kufi writing originates from the region of Kufa
| in modern-day Iraq, also the source of the Kufiyyeh headdress.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kufa
| hinell wrote:
| Incomprehensible for outsiders. Though, any script can be fit
| into "square" writing.
| xanderlewis wrote:
| Some more easily than others.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| It varies, the example from the Topkapi Scroll, with the tile-
| like patterns of triangles and swastikas, took me a minute to
| recognize (but it's been 25yr since I took Arabic as an
| undergrad). Some of the other examples are fun, the shahada
| that looks like minarets is actually mirrored text, so it reads
| backwards from the left and normally (well, it's super-
| stylized) from the right.
| mvieira38 wrote:
| Why is there only an accept option for cookies?
| Batman8675309 wrote:
| Because they can. I've encountered plenty of pages like this
| and it would seem that doing so is risk free.
| otras wrote:
| I always enjoyed the cover of Jeff Erickson's _Algorithms_ book,
| which is _al-Khwarizmi_ in this style.
|
| https://jeffe.cs.illinois.edu/teaching/algorithms/
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Khwarizmi
| sudahtigabulan wrote:
| This one is not Kufic, but it's my favorite:
|
| https://imgur.com/a/G9RAzGv
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