アラビア語書道の各スタイルにおけるアルファベットの立体的分析

抄録

No one will dispute the fact that the Arabic calligraphy has so long history which dates back to the 10th century that it could create various kinds of traditional writing styles according to the difference in the countries and the periods in which it prevailed. These writing styles are, for example, Naskhy, Thulthy, Diwany, Jali-Diwany, Farisy, Ruq'i, Ijazy and so on. Each of these styles has its own alphabets, whose shapes are clearly different from those of other styles. There is no doubt that the shapes are so refined and beautiful that even foreigners who cannot understand Arabic or Persian, could appreciate their artistic values. As for me, I have been interested in this art since I began to study Arabic. As my interest in this calligraphy increased, I began to consider where the secrets of its beauty lie. As the first step to find out the secrets, my consideration was directed to the shapes of the alphabets themselves in the abovementioned styles. When I looked into them, I found that some lines of the alphabets look three-dimensional objects though they are written on the two-dimensional paper. So I came to guess that these shapes of the alphabets could be said to be silhouettes of certain three-dimensional objects which are made of long narrow pieces of solid paper. Based on this supposition, I tried to make the shapes of the alphabets by using tapes (about 2cm in breadth) of solid paper,which were mounted on even cardboard, according to their traditional shapes. Then an investigation was made to analize the direction from which the objects are seen to appear just like the original shapes of the equivalent alphabets. This investigation was done for each styles of Arabic calligraphy. It is worth mentioning that the results of the invetsigation were very interesting and new to us: The investigations showed us that the directions from which the tape-made objects are seen, are slightly different according to the writing styles (Naskhy, Thulthy, Diwany, Farisy and Ruq'i). It should be specially noted that the analyses also made it clear that some of the writing styles have several alphabets whose lines are not partially equal to the reflected images of the equivalent tape-made objects. Most of these exceptional parts were found at the ends of the lines. We could say that they might be regarded as artificial ones joined to the other natural lines. Detailed explanations for the components of the lines of each of the alphabets were made in the following main text.