The Book Before Printing: Ancient, Medieval and Oriental (Lettering, Calligraphy, Typography) by Diringer David

Author:Diringer, David [Diringer, David]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780486142494
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2013-01-16T16:00:00+00:00

SPREAD OF ARABIC SCRIPT

Even more than Arabic speech, the Arabic script was widely adopted, thanks to the diffusion of the Moslem holy book. Becoming in turn the script of the Persian and, especially, of the Ottoman Empire, its use spread in time to the Balkan peninsula, to what is now the south-eastern portion of European Russia, to India, to central and south-eastern Asia, and to a great part of Africa. Thus, the Arabic alphabet had to be adapted not only to Semitic languages (such as Hebrew), but also to languages belonging to other linguistic groups, such as Slavic (in Bosnia), Spanish (the Arabic script employed for Spanish is called aljamiah), Persian, Pashtu, Balochi, Balti, Urdu and other Indian languages—all these forms of speech belonging to the Indo-European linguistic family—and, in addition, to Turco-Tatar and Caucasian languages, to various Malay-Polynesian languages, and various African languages (such as Berber, Swahili, and Sudanese)—Fig. VIII—2, c, 3 and 12.

Apart from Arabic inscriptions and coins, the earliest written documents extant are a number of papyri discovered in Egypt, some of which (now preserved in Vienna) belong to the first half of the seventh century A.D., but the greater part (now mainly in Cairo) are assigned to the second half of the same century and to the eighth century: Fig. IV—15, f.

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