SHEILA CANBY: Hello, I'm Sheila Canby. I am the Curator in Charge of the Department of Islamic Art. This piece of calligraphy comes from an enormous Qur'an that was… thought to have been made in Samarkand for either Tamerlane -- Timur -- or his grandson, Baysungur. We actually now know that its scribe, or the person who copied it in this majestic Muhaqqaq script, was someone named Umar Akta. And he would have used a reed pen, not a brush, and that adds to the control, because you can notice at the end of the letters there's a very sharp angle of the long letters that is… made possible by the reed pen. He was supposed to have wanted to please… Timor, by producing such a tiny little Qur'an, a complete Qur'an. It was so tiny that it could fit underneath the seal of Timur's ring. Well, Timur, who had grandiose visions in many ways and directions, was not at all impressed. So then Umar Akta decided that in order to impress Timur, he would make the largest Qur'an that one could imagine. We know that it was made originally probably to go with the grand mosque that Timur constructed in Samarkand. And it also is one of the most distinctive Qur'ans in all of Islamic art.