Browse Items (101 total)

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,…

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…

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 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,…

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,…

Known in Arabic as mihbara and in Persian as dawat, inkwells like this one were an essential tool for medieval scribes, protecting the ink from dirt and enabling it to be transported easily. The two loops on either side may have been used as slots…

The rectangular form of this porcelain box to hold writing tools, with a stepped base and gently curved lid adorned with roundels containing stylized Arabic inscriptions, suggests that the scribes who used it served the Muslim bureaucrats or…

Book stands are used in a wide range of devotional traditions -- Hinduism, Sikhism, Christianity, and Islam -- to protect and pay respect to the book, and to present it to the readers gathered around it. An example of the Islamic book stand (rehal,…

A pencase (qalamdan), carried tucked into a shawl tied around the waist, is the symbolic badge of the scribe's vocation. While some scribes served the general public, preparing documents for those unable to write, others worked for highly educated…

These book covers, made in the fourteenth or fifteenth century, exemplify a style of Islamic cover decoration and manuscript illumination that dates to the ninth century, featuring a central medallion with interlocking squares and pendants…

Although this looks like the outside cover of a book, it is actually the highly decorated lining of the inner cover, or 'doublure.' Islamic doublures, created using the same techniques as the outer covers, were treated as equally important by both…

The intricate golden covers of this book were tooled using a large stamp pressed into the covers along a horizontal central line, creating a perfectly symmetrical design. Now missing the characteristic envelope flap, these covers were likely produced…