Browse Items (101 total)

"Glory to God" (subhan Allah) appears on the right-hand page as an ornate Arabic letter form upon a delicate floral background. The sweeping letter forms and particularly thin uprights show how the monumental thuluth script was adapted by Chinese…

The contents (Sanskrit text and Hindu iconography), materials (Islamic burnished paper and Indian textiles), and format (Islamic-style binding) of this manuscript containing the Hindu Bhagavad Gita all illuminate the fecund encounter of Persian and…

Beautiful but fragile textiles are among the rarest items to survive from the medieval Silk Roads. Often only a few fragments remain, such as the hem of a sleeve or collar, as in the delicate tapestry-woven script (Arabic tiraz, derived from the…

This manuscript painting depicts three courtiers of Alexander the Great, wearing robes with tiraz weavings on their sleeves, dutifully gathering at his tomb to mourn him.

"The pen is a key that opens the door to the necessities of life." These Ottoman tools of the scribe feature exquisite workmanship in steel and brass with precious inlays of gold, silver, ivory, and turquoise. The elegant execution of these tools -…

This monumental map follows India’s Ganges River and one of its sources, the Alakananda, from the point of view of a Hindu pilgrim travelling from one shrine to the next, following the path of the rivers from left to right. Beginning at Devprayag,…

This wall graphic of book formats along the Silk Roads features diagrams and brief definitions of a scroll, a pothi book, a concertina or accordion book, and a codex.

The diagram consists of line diagrams: on the upper row, scroll and pothi book;…

Produced in a Mughal court in Lahore, this image comes from a late 16th-century manuscript on Ethics by author Nasir al-Din Tusi (1201-1274) and includes the name of the manuscript painter, Sanju. The artist has chosen to illustrate his own arduous…

Prayer books in the Christian tradition (or ‘Books of Hours’) list the regular set times and appropriate prayers for every day of the year. The Latin masculine word endings of the prayers reveal that this book was made for a male user, perhaps a…

A line drawing of a link/loop stitch sewing on an Islamic book. The image features six quires (gatherings of folded pages) stacked horizontally, one on top of the other. The quires are connected at the spine by two seams of link/loop stitch running…

An Omeka assignment for an undergraduate or graduate course, based on building a public-facing scholarly digital exhibit in Omeka, studying a premodern book together with relevant comparators from GLAM (Gallery, Library, Archive, Museum)…

These Mishnah (Oral Torah) leaves come from the Cairo Genizah, the famed storeroom discovered in a synagogue's attic containing 400,000 carefully preserved document fragments dating from the ninth to nineteenth centuries. In the Jewish tradition,…

This magnificent Qur'an was copied in 1847 on a narrow paper scroll that is more than five metres (sixteen feet) long. Its tiny 'dust' script (ghubar) is a miniature form of naskh that was originally developed for the minute messages conveyed by…

Both the reader's thoughtful expression and the tenderness with which he holds the book, as a cat purrs at his feet, express the sensation of being completely immersed in reading. This drawing is executed in the 'half pen' (Persian, nim qalam)…

This East African Qur'an was produced in Harar, the capital of a vibrant Islamic emirate that co-existed with the Christian and Jewish communities of Ethiopia. Harar's scribes developed a distinctive style of Arabic script that is related to bihari…

The fusion of Persian and Indian art found in eighteenth-century Mughal India is embodied in this Qur'an written on cloth. Its various scripts--the minute ghubari ('dust') of the text, with chapter headings in majestic red thuluth--demonstrate the…

Both horse and camel appear in the striking images of this conical bowl, where a rider is painted at the center, surrounded by a merchant caravan, while the bowl's sides depict six camels laden with bags, led by an attendant. The camels almost seem…

A camel fight--whether featuring two-humped camels or the one-humped dromedaries seen here--is a frequent theme in the art of Iran and Mughal India reflecting the importance of camels in transport, trade, and culture. The sense of violent movement…

Central Asia is known as the land of textiles, where the art of producing resist-dyed and woven (ikat) fabrics reached its height in the nineteenth century. These robes (chapans), worn by both men and women, were made from silk or velvet and, later,…