A book in Persian

This painting is a page of a book, a handwritten book in Persian. Today, Persian is mainly spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and parts of Uzbekistan, but in the premodern era it functioned as a lingua franca in an area that stretched from Bengal to the Balkans – an area often referred to as the “Persianate world”.

The Persian language has a long history which dates back to the Achaemenid kings, but it underwent many changes over the centuries. After the advent of Islam in the 7th century, Persian adopted the Arabic script and was enriched by Arabic vocabulary.

From the year 1000 onwards, Persian became increasingly important as a prestigious language of culture and administration, in particular in the Muslim courts of Central Asia, Iran and the Indian subcontinent. As book printing in this part of the world only became widespread in the course of the 19th century, books and documents produced for the court (and beyond) were always handwritten and often prepared by trained calligraphers.