Chapter 19 - The Here and the Hereafter: Rounded and Angular Inscriptions in Medieval Syria, Anatolia and the Jazira

Summary

Traditionally, the science of epigraphy has focused on inscriptions that contain information of historical and art historical interest: dates of construction, names and titles of patrons, names of builders and designers, and the like. Most architectural inscriptions do not record the names of those involved in construction, rebuilding and endowing. With notable exceptions, only in the last decades have scholars of or treating epigraphy given weight to complete epigraphic programmes, including questions of epigraphic style, scale, colour and placement.

The primary topics of this chapter are not so much the subject matter, but the style and placement of inscriptions in medieval Syria, Anatolia and the Jazira. Much of what follows covers familiar ground, trod long ago by giants such as Max van Berchem (d. 1921) and Ernst Herzfeld (d. 1948). Since then, many scholars, prominent among them Yasser Tabbaa and Terry Allen, have turned their gaze to the architecture and epigraphy of medieval Syria. One epigraphic topic treated by all those named, and many others, is the change from angular (Kufic) to rounded (curvilinear, naskh) styles of writing Arabic inscriptions in the medieval Islamic world around the beginning of the fifth/eleventh century. A subset of this larger development was the switch in mid-sixth/twelfth century Syria by Zangid ruler Nūr al-Dīn Zangī (r. 541–65/1147–74) from angular to rounded styles for historical inscriptions, which has been considered as part of a multivalent programme of promotion of Sunni Islam against both the Crusaders and the Shi'a Fatimids on the part of this ruler. Herzfeld contrasted the epigraphic shift instituted by Nūr al-Dīn with what he presented as a longer, more gradual process in the Islamic east. Max van Berchem, a native of Geneva, began the association of Sunni Islam with legible, rounded manuscript hands now used by Nūr al-Dīn's masons for epigraphy, and in contrast to the difficulty of reading knotted, floriated and otherwise elaborated angular scripts, a linkage that has an air of the Protestant Reformation about it.

What new can another treatment bring to this subject? One is the widening of the field of epigraphic enquiry beyond a consideration of epigraphy as the study primarily of historical texts.