The History of Arabic Calligraphy - an Essay on its greatest Artists and its Development

Essay from the year 2010 in the subject Orientalism / Sinology - Arabistic, grade: 1,0, , course: Historia y Cultura Árabo Islámica, language: English, abstract: In this Essay I will give a general overview of the development of Arabic Calligraphy from its beginning till today. The reader will soon learn that the evolution of this elaborate and complex art was always closely linked to great personalities. Artists that, in its early times, formed and systematized this art, later brought it to its peaks and in the last centuries revised and modernized it. Writing about the History of Calligraphy will therefor be writing about a line of persons that, step by step, on succeeded by another, defined Arabic calligraphy in their time and, in its whole, brought it to where it is today. As Calligraphy is the art of elaborated writing it is of course closely linked to script and language. The Arabic language developed already before the coming of Islam1, but Arabic calligraphy as an art with different styles, uses and a certain place in society, was a phenomena that appeared in the time of the first great empires. That is why I will focus on the development in and after this times. That means I'm not gonna investigate preislamic Arabic calligraphy or look at the development of the Arabic language and its aesthetic aspects (fields that would provide enough material for interesting researches for its own). As the art I will write about has been performed for many centuries and in a great extend, there are many old and new works in display around the work. In the appendix some of them will be shown, to give examples and make this essay a little more than just a historical investigation.