Nastaliq developed in fourteenth and fifteenth century Persia as a fusion, its very name a compound of naskh and taliq, an earlier chancery hand it drew upon, and it is immediately recognisable by its short, gently sloping vertical strokes and its long, sweeping horizontal ones, which give lines of text a characteristic sense of hanging or cascading down and to the left across the page, a visual rhythm quite distinct from the more upright proportions of Arabic naskh and thuluth. The script is traditionally associated with the master calligrapher Mir Ali Tabrizi, credited by later Persian sources with either inventing or decisively perfecting nastaliq, and it became, over the following centuries, the primary script of Persian literary culture specifically, prized above all for writing poetry, the great classical Persian poetic tradition of Ferdowsi, Hafez, Saadi and Rumi finding in nastaliq's flowing, elegant line a script felt to suit lyric verse better than the more architectural Arabic scripts developed originally for Qur'anic and religious use.
From Persia the script spread with Persianate court culture across a wide swath of Asia, becoming the dominant script for Urdu in South Asia and remaining influential in Ottoman literary and chancery writing, so that nastaliq today marks a specifically Persianate cultural and literary sphere distinct from, though overlapping with, the broader Arabic script tradition.