Illustrated Manuscript / Miniatures / Odontophobia
I snapped this photo of a page of an Ottoman era illustrated dental textbook at an antique shop window in Kizlaragasi Inn. Ottoman book arts, specifically the Ottoman miniature art form which follows the tradition of Persian miniatures has been around for centuries. Before the introduction of the printing press, miniature artists painstakingly illustrated each copy of a book separately.
Looking at that illustration, maybe odontophobia is not irrational after all.
A friend of mine informed me that the script around the illustration is Ottoman Turkish. For over a thousand years, Turkish was written using a barely adequate form of the Perso-Arabic script. The currently used modified Latin script was adapted in 1929 by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
