West and Central Asia, 500 BCE–1980 CE

Skilled workshops turned costly materials into luxury objects for rulers. The brass Baptistère de Saint Louis is inlaid with gold and silver, Persian manuscript paintings like Bahram Gur Fights the Karg use opaque watercolor, gold and silver on paper, and the silk-and-wool Ardabil Carpet holds millions of hand-tied knots.

These works were made for particular users. The Kaaba is the focus of Muslim prayer and of the Hajj pilgrimage, the Great Mosque of Isfahan gathered the community for prayer around a courtyard with four iwans (vaulted halls open on one side), the Jowo Rinpoche is Tibet's most sacred image of the Buddha, and The Court of Gayumars was painted for a Safavid royal manuscript seen by a small elite audience.

These works blend traditions from different cultures. Petra's Treasury mixes Nabataean and Hellenistic (Greek-style) architecture, the Bamiyan Buddhas, carved into a cliff on a Silk Road route and destroyed in 2001, drew on Gandharan art, which blended Indian Buddhist and Greco-Roman ideas, the Dome of the Rock borrowed a Byzantine-style plan and mosaics for an early Islamic shrine, and the Abbasid-era Qur'an folio is written in angular Kufic, a style of Arabic script used for Qur'ans across the early Islamic world.