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| Cairo floor |
These photos are from Egypt and India; text is Will Durant,
The Story of Civilization, vol. IV.
"We probably owe this splendor of ornament to the Semitic prohibition of human or animal forms in art: as if in compensation, the Moslem artist invented or adopted an overflowing abundance of non-representational forms."
"He sought an outlet first in geometrical figures -- line, angle, square, cube, polygon, cone, spiral, ellipse, circle, sphere;"
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| Cairo floor 2 |
"He repeated these in a hundred combinations, and developed them into swirls, guilloches, reticulations, entrelacs, and stars."
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| Cairo floor 3 |
"Passing to floral forms, he designed, in many materials, wreaths, vines, or rosettes of lotus, acanthus, or palm tendrils or leaves."
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| Taj Mahal detail |
In the tenth century he merged all these in the arabesque; and to them all, as a unique and major ornament, he added Arabic script.
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| Mohamed Ali mosque, Cairo |
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