Genji Monogatari Emaki
The word "emaki" stems from the word "emakimono" meaning "picture scrolls". The emakimono picture scrolls consisted of two designs: Pictures that were painted on a scroll with text added to the same scroll or a number of paintings that accompanied passages of text and were joined together in a scroll. The first known picture scroll was produced in Japan during the late ninth or tenth century. The "Genji Monogatari" picture scroll, however, was produced in the early twelfth century. Not only is the "Genji Monogatari Emaki" the oldest surviving monogatari scroll but it is also the oldest surviving non-Buddhist scroll in Japan. There is no exact date to the scroll, but it is estimated to being sometime between 1120 and 1140, in which case it was created just a little over a century after Murasaki Shikibu wrote "The Tale of Genji".
Palaeography
Though less than a century intervenes between the Ravenna cursive and the oldest extant Merovingian document (AD 625), there is a great difference in appearance between the two writings. The facile flow of the former is replaced by a cramped style, in which the natural slope to the right gives way to an upright hand, and the letters, instead of being fully outlined, are compressed to such an extent that they modify the shape of other letters. Copyists of books used a cursive similar to that found in documents, except that the strokes are thicker, the forms more regular, and the heads and tails shorter. The Merovingian cursive as used in books underwent simplification in some localities, undoubtedly through the influence of the minuscule book-hand of the period. The two principal centres of this reform were Luxeuil and Corbie.In Spain, after the Visigothic conquest, the Roman cursive gradually developed special characteristics. Some documents attributed to the 7th century display a transitional hand with straggling and rather uncouth forms. The distinctive features of Visigothic writing, the most noticeable of which is certainly the q-shaped g, did not appear until later, in the book-hand. The book-hand became set at an early date. In the 8th century it appears as a sort of semi-cursive; the earliest example of certain date is ms lxxxix in the Capitular Library in Verona. From the 9th century the calligraphic forms become broader and more rounded until the 11th century, when they become slender and angular. The Visigothic minuscule appears in a cursive form in documents about the middle of the 9th century, and in the course of time grows more intricate and consequently less legible. It soon came into competition with the Carolingian minuscule, which supplanted it as a result of the presence in Spain of French elements such as Cluniac monks and warriors engaged in the campaign against the Moors.