Letters as art: reading signs and style

This lesson asks you to read and interpret signs, symbols and style in art works. The museum links records on the Arabic script and its early styles, and on Islamic calligraphy; your class will add the signs and styles of other art works. ¹

Look at the expectation: it asks you to read signs and style. Choose a line of writing and ask what its letters stand for, then ask what its style adds to the words.

Who wrote, and for what, shaped how they wrote. The Encyclopaedia of Islam says that government scribes, calligraphers working for luxury patrons, pious copyists of the Qur'an, scholars taking dictation, merchants writing letters and makers of amulets did not all write alike, and that how legible a text had to be shaped its letters. It cites decorative scripts on objects, such as figural letters on inlaid metalwork and rigid angular figures on astrolabes. It also says that leading calligraphers often drew models on paper for inscriptions made in other materials, so it rejects a sharp divide between inscriptional and manuscript scripts ². See Islamic calligraphy.

The records print no sentence in which Yaqut al-Musta'simi says why he fixed the six principal hands. They show where he worked and who patronised him. Sheila Blair says he became a secretary in the Abbasid chancery, and that after Hulegu took Baghdad in 1258 his career flourished under Mongol patronage. He taught calligraphy to the sons of Ata-Malik al-Juvayni, who governed the city for the Mongols ³. The TDV encyclopaedia says that in the seventh century AH he fixed the six principal hands, and that his great change was to cut the reed pen at a slant ⁴.

The older view holds that Kufic and naskhi were two originally separate scripts, one angular and one flexible. The Encyclopaedia of Islam rejects this and stresses the basic unity of early Arabic writing. It still places in the Umayyad period the start of the two branches that later diverged ⁵.

Kufic and naskh look very different on the page, yet the encyclopaedia stresses the unity of early Arabic writing. What can you tell about a script's family just by looking at its letters, what can you not, and why?

• Islamic calligraphy: the Encyclopaedia of Islam on the early scripts, the rounded hands and the great masters.
• The Arabic script: the accounts of Ibn al-Nadim and the order of the early scripts.
• Yaqut al-Musta'simi: his life according to Sheila Blair, and the difficulty of knowing his hand.
• The calligrapher: the six principal hands and the masters who set them.

Read Islamic calligraphy and The Arabic script. Pick two scripts the records name and write one sentence on each describing what makes its shape different.