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.
Calligraffiti
The practice of calligraffiti appears to have begun in the Middle East and North Africa in around the 1950s, when local artists, searching for a visual language that expressed their national identity and heritage, began incorporating Arabic letters, as a graphic form, into their artworks. Artists such as the Lebanese painter and poet, Etel Adnan (b. 1925); the Egyptian painter, Ramzi Moustafa (b. 1926) and the Iraqi painter-sculptor and philosopher, Shakir Hassan Al Said (b.1925) all searched for ways to use Arabic letters in abstract compositions.