Kufa is also where the kufic script was developed, the earliest script of the Arabic language. As the scholar al-Qalqashandi maintained, "The Arabic script ["khatt"] is the one which is now known as Kufic. From it evolved all the present hands." The angular script which later came to be known as Kufic had its origin about a century earlier than the founding of the town of Kufa, according to Moritz in the "Encyclopaedia of Islam". The kufic script was derived from one of the four pre-Islamic Arabic scripts, the one called "al-Hiri" (used in Hirah). (The other three were "al-Anbari" (from Anbar), "al-Makki" (from Mecca) and "al-Madani" (from Medina)). Ibn al-Nadim (died ca. 999) the author of the famous "Kitab al-Fihrist", an index of Arabic books, dedicates the a section of the first chapter to calligraphy. He was the first to use the word 'kufic' to characterize this script, which reached a state of decorative perfection in the 8th century, when surahs were used to decorate ceramics, for representations of nature were strictly forbidden under the Islamic regime. Al-Fihrist contains the biographies of many of the grammarian philologists from the school of Kufa and from its rival school of Basra. A third chapter treats of the grammarians from both schools.