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24* Jay Rovner

professionally done that one has the impression that the art of micrography had
in fact developed earlier, but, unfortunately, such material has not survived.
Masoretic work evidently having begun in the seventh century, there is a space
of some three centuries within which the data could have been determined,
developed and written, and, as such, become a matter of design and artifice,
from the margins of biblical texts and onto separate micrographic carpet pages.

(above) reproduces zoomorphic calligrams from the fifteenth century (pp. 449-456), and a
calligraphic bird from Turkey, 1798 (p. 507), but no micrographs. A. Khatibi, The Splendour
ofIslamic Calligraphy2, tr. J. Hughes (New York 1996) has a couple of micrographic pages
(pp. 132-133), but they are from the nineteenth century. M. Sijilmassi, Enluminures des
manuscrits Morocco (Coubevoie ca. 1987), pp. 81-84, displays manuscripts with marginal
notes written in small script to accompany a text, some written at angles to distinguish
one from the other (see below on zigzag writing), but no micrography. According to N.
F. Safwat (with a contribution by M. Zakariya), The Art of the Pen: Calligraphy of the
14th to 20th Centuries, [The Nasser D. Khalili Collection ofIslamic Art, v. 5] (London and
New York ca. 1996), p. 184-192, Ghubar writing, which is closer to micrography, does
not appear until the Mamluk (thirteenth-sixteenth century Egypt and Syria) and Ilkhanid
(thirteenth — fourteenth century, Turkey and eastwards to Tabriz and Bukhara, and beyond
Iraq) periods. The closest one comes to micrography is in vol. 2 of the aforementioned
series: D. James, The Master Scribes: Qur'ans of the 10th to 14th Centuries AD (London
ca. 1992), where a fourteenth-century Koran page, part of whose text is continued into the
margins in a zigzag form using several lines (whereas Hebrew micrography is executed in
single lines) elicits the comment “The zigzag presentation of the text may offer a clue to
its provenance, for commentaries or glosses arranged in this striking fashion do occur in
a number of manuscripts produced in Iraq or the Jazirah during the thirteenth century” (p.
146). The point is rendered moot in terms of geographical distribution as well as dating, for
V. Mann (according to a personal communication) has found evidence of minuscule zigzag
formations in the margins of a manuscript copied in Valencia, Spain, in 1172 or 1173,
reproduced in J. Dodds (ed.), Al-Andalus: The Art ofIslamic Spain (New York 1992), no.
77. In conclusion, Arabic scribes did not adopt a form of micrography until two or three
centuries after it was being used in Hebrew Bibles, and the form employed was exceedingly
simple: zigzag-shaped inscriptions, as opposed to geometric, botanical, or other designs. The
magnificent Islamic carpet pages surviving from the tenth and eleventh centuries (and later,
of course), many incorporating Arabic writing into their liquid geometrical and botanical
arabesque and latticework devices, give the distinct impression that Islamic scribes and
illuminators felt that the cursive-style scripts utilized in those designs lent themselves more
to intricate arabesque patterns than to micrographic drawing.