Some carpet pages

This carpet page is from the Qur’an of Ibn al-Bawwāb, from 11th century Baghdad. It is currently in the Chester Beatty Library, where it has great zoom.

Made in 1153, this Arabic Qur’an has two carpet pages opening the book. Currently in the Harry Ransom Centre in the Books Before Gutenburg section.

A carpet page done by Arghûn Shâh, a well known painter in 1375. Possibly in Cairo (please let me know if you find an exact location).

This is a Jewish carpet page from 15th century Yemen (the date given in the binding is 1469). The first half of the book is a Grammatical introduction or Makhberet ha-Tigan and the second half is Pentateuch (the five books of Moses) with masorah magna and masora parva. It also has other carpet pages in Arabic-

This means that not only Jewish scholars worked on the book, but also Muslim scholars. It is currently in the British Library.
Bibliography
The Qur’anic Manuscripts In Museums, Institutes, Libraries & Collections.
An Introduction to Hebrew Manuscripts by Joseph Gutmann , Evelyn M. Cohen , Menahem Schmelzer , Malachi Beit-Arié. A lecture available to read from the NY Public Library. Via Fathom.
Arabic Art Forms in Spanish Book Production by the Bodleian Library.
Online Gallery: Sacred Texts by the British Library.
Observations on Illustrated Byzantine Psalters by John Lowden. JStor article.
Hebrew Manuscript Painting in Late Medieval Spain: Signs of a Culture in Transition by Katrin Kogman-Appel. JStor article.
Jewish Art and Non-Jewish Culture: The Dynamics of Artistic Borrowing in Medieval Hebrew Manuscript Illumination by Katrin Kogman-Appel. JStor article.

Sufi dancers and Hafiz

This is a page from an early 16th century Persian copy of the Divan of Hafiz or Hafez. His full name was Khwāja Šamsu d-Dīn Muḥammad Hāfez-e Šhīrāzī but is known under his pen name of Hafez.

His works are still taught today and were an influence of Sufi mysticism since the 14th century. Some of his works can be seen on Poet Seers.com and Black Cat Poems. This picture is currently in the Freer and Sackler Gallery.

Differing dancers in the Akbarnama

Both of these painting were done in 1590-1595, in a work called the Akbarnama, or Book Of Akbar. Meant as an official record of his reign, Abu’l Fath Jalaluddin Muhammad Akbar was the third emperor of the Mughal Empire. A full English translation by Colonel H.S. Jarret (translated out of Persian in 1884) can be read and downloaded here on the Internet Archive. The Akbarnama had at least 49 artists of the Mughal Painting School. The picture above was done by La’l and Banwali Khord. An opaque watercolour with gold on paper, the height is 32 cm and the width is 18.9 cm. It is currently in the Victoria & Albert Museum.

The painting above was done to show Akbar’s victory in Malwa, over Baz Bahadur. The romance of Baz Bahadur and Rupmati is still well known in the region today. The dancers are dressed in a style completely different to other dancers in the Akbarnama. They are wearing a combination of tight pants and layered short skirts. The artists who did the work were Kesav Kalan and Dharmdas, the height is 32.9 cm and the width is 25 cm and also made out of watercolour on paper with gold. Also in the Victoria & Albert Museum.

Other online manuscripts

Harvard University in their Open Collections Program, has made available over 280 works, covering language, medicine, literature, calligraphy etc. from many different regions, such as England, Albania, Egypt, Syria and Uzbekistan.

Open Collections Program.

Beautiful works fully digitized and search-able. Highly recommended for research.

An online manuscript

In the 13th century a book called Kitab Aja’ib al-makhluqat wa Gharaib al-Mawjudat or “The Wonders of Creation” was written by Abu Yahya Zakariya ibn Muhammad ibn Mahmud-al-Qazwini, known now as just Al-Qazwini. At the time Iraq was under the Persian empire.

The National Library of Medicine has put a few medical and natural history manuscripts online, including the above manuscript and Hieronymus Brunschwig’s “Liber de Arte Distilland” from 1512. They are available to view here.

The Book of Curiosities

In 2002, the Bodleian Library, Oxford purchased a previously unknown Islamic manuscript. The title is Kitāb Gharāʾib al-funūn wa-mulaḥ al-ʿuyūn, or the “Book of Curiosities of the Sciences and Marvels for the Eyes”.
The above picture is a diagram of the winds. The manuscript is in two parts, the “universe” and the “earth”. The earth part contains one of the first rectangular maps of the world prior to the renaissance, while the universe section talks of the astronomical.

The manuscript is a cosmographical one, written in Fatimid Egypt in the 12th century, a copy of an earlier 11th century one.

The Bodleian Library has high resolution scans of the books, as well as Arabic & English translations (by holding the mouse over the text). On a strange note, the maps have south at the top of the maps, and north at the bottom. Follow the link-

Medieval Islamic Views of the Cosmos: The Book of Curiosities

Bibliography
Bibliodyssey– The Book of Curiosities.
Desicritics.org– The Book of Curiosities.
art-humanities.net– The Book of Curiosities: An early 11th-century Arabic cosmography.

Geniza

You may think this is an arabic word, but it is not. It is a hebrew word for “resting place”. This is a room attached to a synagogue where documents bearing the name of god are placed, as they cannot be destroyed. It is usually a room or a basement but the Cairo Geniza, founded in the 9th century, had quite a few rooms, containing 280,000 Jewish, Muslim and Christian manuscript fragments.

The documents cover a large period of time and many topics. They cover marriage contracts, community minutes, debts, leases, title-deeds, rabbinical court records, wills, private letters as well as 200 unknown poems from Judah Halevi, personal papers from Moses Maimonides and religious tracts from the Old Testament, New Testament and Qur’an.

Most of the records are written in Aramaic, in hebrew script. By Jewish law, it was written in God’s language and can’t be destroyed once the purpose of the document is served.

More recent documents have poems in yiddish from the 13th-15th centuries. There is also documentation of the large-scale conversion of the Kingdom of Khazaria in the pages.

If interested Papyyri Pages has many links to follow to Universities and Libraries which are studying the documents. A book by Paul Kahle titled “The Cairo Geniza” is available for download here.

Bibliography
Cairo Geniza- Wikipedia
Jewish Virtual Library
Papyri Pages