The Arabic language belongs to the group of Semitic alphabetical scripts in which mainly the consonants are represented. The script is derived from the Aramic Nabataean alphabet. It is a script of 28 letters and uses long but not short vowels. These letters are made
up of only 17 distinct forms, distinguished one from one another by a dot or dots placed above or below the letter. Short vowels are indicated by small diagonal strokes above or below letters. Written without dots and diacritical points, Arabic script looks flat and barren. But when the dots and diacritical points are added, the script becomes visual poetry.

Arabic calligraphy is the art of beautiful or elegant handwriting as exhibited by the correct formation of characters, the ordering of the various parts, and harmony of proportions. The artist usually express their art and skills writing words or verses from the Holy Quran and verses of great poets.


The Thuluth

Thuluth Script was formulated in the 7th century AD during the Umayyad caliphate, but it did not develop fully until the late 9th century AD. The name means 'a third' -- perhaps because of the proportion of straight lines to curves, or perhaps because the script was a third the size of another popular contemporary script.

Thuluth has enjoyed enormous popularity as an ornamental script for calligraphic inscriptions, titles, headings and colophons. It is still the most important of all the ornamental scripts.

Thuluth script is characterized by curved letters written with barbed heads. The letters are linked and sometimes intersecting, thus engendering a cursive flow of ample and often complex proportions. Thuluth is known for its elaborate graphics and remarkable plasticity.

The Kufic Script

Kufic script, a heavy monumental Arabic script suited to stone carving, appears in the earliest surviving Koran manuscripts. In these, the diacritical marks over the letters are sometimes painted in red, and the gold decorations between suras contrast handsomely with the heavy black script. In the Seljuk period, a more cursive flowing script, Naskhi, developed. The two styles were often used for contrast in architecture and decorative contexts.

The term Kufic means "the script of Kufah," an Islamic city founded in Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq) in AD 638. Kufic is a more or less square and rectilinear script characterized by its heavy, bold, and lapidary style. Its letters are generally thick, squat, and unslanted, and it was particularly suitable for writing on stone or metal, for painting or carving inscriptions on the walls of mosques, and for lettering on coins. Professional copyists employed a particular form of Kufic for reproducing the earliest copies of the Qur'an that have survived. The writing is frequently large, especially in the early examples, so that there may be as few as three lines to a single page. The script can hardly be described as stiff and angular; rather, the pace is majestic and measured. With the high development of Arabic calligraphy, Kufic writing became an exceptionally beautiful script. From it, there were derived a number of other styles, chiefly medieval, in North and Central Africa, Spain, and northern Arabia.