THE INTRODUCTION OF PAPER TO THE ISLAMIC LANDS AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ILLUSTRATED MANUSCRIPT

Abstract

Scholars have offered various explanations for this phenomenon. Some, adducing pictorial evidence from the other arts, such as ceramics, have argued that manuscript illustration had been practiced for a long time in the Islamic lands, although no illustrated manuscripts actually survive from early times.2 Others have traced this explosion of illustrated books to external influences, such as artists in the Islamic lands copying Middle Byzantine or Syrian Jacobite painting,3 while still others have argued that the appearance of illustrated manuscripts was the result of an internal development, specifically the emergence of the bourgeoisie as patrons of this new art form.4 Oddly enough, few if any scholars have linked the emergence of the illustrated book to the introduction and increasing use of paper.5 Paper was introduced to the Islamic lands from Central Asia in the eighth century and was quickly adopted for use in government offices.6 The oldest surviving book on "Arab" or "Islamic" paper is generally thought to be a Greek manuscript of the teachings of the Church fathers (Vat. Gr. 2200), believed to have been copied in Damascus ca. 800. Apart from a manuscript in the Alexandria public library recently discovered by the Israeli scholar Malachi Beit-Arie,7 the oldest surviving book on paper in Arabic (in Europe) is a work in Leiden on unusual terms in the prophetic traditions, which is dated Dhu'l-Qa'da 252 (November-December 867). It bears no indication of where it was copied.8 Over the course of the ninth and tenth centuries