Page from a Persian Epic Poem (Masnavi)

This leaf was removed from a Persian masnavi, an epic poem in an established meter and rhyming sequence, written in nastal'liq script with headings in thuluth. The decoration here is on one level, with the exception of the three vertical bands separating the text columns. The top and bottom lines are written conventionally, while the rest of the page is laid out in a latticelike pattern. Enlivening a page by laying it out in oblique lines of script was a fairly common practice in Iran and India, but here, most unusually, every other horizontal segment is upside down, so that the manuscript has to be turned sideways in order to read both lines at once. While the epic poem has not yet been identified, this segment comes from the twentieth chapter entitled "Concerning Hopelessness [when it comes to] Fate."