Not sure, I think first image is square or geometric Kufic (sometimes called "Satrancli Kûfi" in Turkish) of course looks quite different than typical Kufic script.
The problem is I don't think the first one says anything, which, however stylistic, is still the point of a script. If it doesn't actually make a meaningful expression then it's not a script. What word has 20 s's in it?
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
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?
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.
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
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.
https://jeffe.cs.illinois.edu/teaching/algorithms/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Khwarizmi
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