Layout Design in Three Manuscripts of Timurid Qur'ans, Reserved in the National Museum of Iran

Old sources are silent about the layout system in Iranian manuscripts. Only some contemporary researchers try to retrieve this system relied on the analysis of a number of these manuscripts. M. Amin. Mahdavi, in a paper titled "Evidence for grid layout in Persian manuscripts" attempts to determine the location of the text format on a page, on the basis of review of 84 different versions; uses a chess plot that divides the page into a horizontal and vertical network structure. In his article "Recherche sur le Module et le trace Correcteur dans la Miniature Orientale", Chahryar Adle also justifies the layout of “Futohate Homayon”, based on the chess infrastructure. Using such an infrastructure means that, on the one hand, the four parameters of the length of the header, the length of the footer, the width of the outer margin and the width of the inner margin should be from the proper relation or at least by an additional 1⁄2, as claimed by Adle, with the length of the page in the parameters of the header and footer lengths and with the width of the page in the parameters of the outer and inner margins; and on other hand, the parameters of the header length with the length of the footer and the width of the outer margin with the width of the inner margin, also show significant proportions. However, there are some Timurid versions, which lack some of these qualities in some of the parameters, and therefore the method proposed by these researchers cannot justify the system governing their layout. The present research has tried to determine how these manuscripts are made layout, in the form of three Qur'anic versions which are now preserved in the National Museum of Iran. The approach of this research is quantitative and the method used in it is descriptive analytic case study. The results of this discussion showed that there might have been another way of design, not based on the principle of dividing the sides of a page into equal parts, but on the basis of two-page design on the face. In this way of layout, the designer divides the length of the bi sheet into n equal parts, assigns 1⁄n of the middle to the inner margins, and the same amount from the top or bottom of it to the margin of the header or footer. Then, using some geometric methods, which mainly relate to the drawing of the main rectangle's diagonals such as bi sheet rectangles or page rectangles or sub-rectangles such as rectangles derived from the page frame and guide lines; determine the location of the other dimensions. The latter method is not only compatible with the construction of a book in the Islamic Middle Ages, which is based on a bi sheet, but also allows the designer to choose the frame appropriately, without the need for the use of the sophisticated numeral system; provides a framework for the inclusion of illumination or text, in which the length ratio is always proportional to width.