Jami' al-tawarikh
The lavish illustrations and calligraphy required the efforts of hundreds of scribes and artists, with the intent that two new copies (one in Persian, and one in Arabic) would be created each year and distributed to schools and cities around the Ilkhanate, in the Middle East, Central Asia, Anatolia, and the Indian subcontinent. Approximately 20 illustrated copies were made of the work during Rashid al-Din's lifetime, but only a few portions remain, and the complete text has not survived. The oldest known copy is an Arabic version, of which half has been lost, but one set of pages is currently in the Khalili Collection, comprising 59 folios from the second volume of the work. Another set of pages, with 151 folios from the same volume, is owned by the Edinburgh University Library. Two Persian copies from the first generation of manuscripts survive in the Topkapı Palace Library in Istanbul. The early illustrated manuscripts together represent "one of the most important surviving examples of Ilkhanid art in any medium", and are the largest surviving body of early examples of the Persian miniature.
Calligraphy
In ancient China, the oldest Chinese characters existing are Jiǎgǔwén characters (甲骨文) carved on ox scapulae and tortoise plastrons, because the dominators in Shang Dynasty carved pits on such animals' bones and then baked them to gain auspice of military affairs, agricultural harvest, or even procreating and weather. During the divination ceremony, after the cracks were made, the characters were written with a brush on the shell or bone to be later carved. (Keightley, 1978). With the development of "Jīnwén" (Bronzeware script) and "Dàzhuàn" (Large Seal Script) "cursive" signs continued. Mao Gong Ding is one of the most famous and typical Bronzeware scripts in the Chinese calligraphy history. It has 500 characters on the bronze which is the largest number of bronze inscription we have discovered so far. . Moreover, each archaic kingdom of current China had its own set of characters.