Islamic art
Calligraphic design is omnipresent in Islamic art, where, as in Europe in the Middle Ages, religious exhortations, including Qur'anic verses, may be included in secular objects, especially coins, tiles and metalwork, and most painted miniatures include some script, as do many buildings. Use of Islamic calligraphy in architecture extended significantly outside of Islamic territories; one notable example is the use of Chinese calligraphy of Arabic verses from the Qur'an in the Great Mosque of Xi'an. Other inscriptions include verses of poetry, and inscriptions recording ownership or donation. Two of the main scripts involved are the symbolic "kufic" and "naskh" scripts, which can be found adorning and enhancing the visual appeal of the walls and domes of buildings, the sides of minbars, and metalwork. Islamic calligraphy in the form of painting or sculptures are sometimes referred to as "quranic art".
Threshing board
The threshing boards must have been important in the protohistory of Mesopotamia, since they already appear in some of the oldest written documents discovered: specifically, several sandstone tablets from the early town of Kish (Iraq), engraved with cuneiform pictograms, which could be the world's oldest surviving written record, dating to the middle of the 4th millennium BC (Early Uruk period). One of these tablets, preserved in the Ashmolean Museum of Oxford University, appears to have pictures of threshing boards on both faces, next to some numeric symbols and other pictograms. These presumed threshing boards (which might instead be sledges) have a shape similar to threshing carts that were used until recently in parts of the Middle East where non-industrial agriculture survived. Descriptions also appear in numerous cuneiform clay tablets as early as the third millennium BC.