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established his citadel and palace in the western
part of the city. There are few monuments which
survive from the reign of Timur partly because he
was more concerned with conquest than
architecture and partly because he was more
interested in a more ephemeral type of architecture
represented by gardens, pavilions and tents.
Contemporary accounts describe a series of
magnificent gardens with three-storey pavilions
made of wood and
decorated with porcelain and
marble. One of the most splendid examples of this
type of architecture must have been the tented
encampment erected to celebrate the wedding of
Timur’s grandsons. It comprised 20,000 tents
arranged into streets in a meadow on the banks of
the Zeravshan river. The most magnificent tent was
that of Timur which was 100 m square with a central
dome supported on twelve giant tent poles above
which was a square wooden turret.
Two major monuments have survived from
Timur’s reign, however; these are the Bibi Khanum
Mosque and the mausoleum of Gur-i Amir. The
Bibi Khanum Mosque is a massive building begun
in 1399, after Timur’s conquest of India. It forms a
rectangle 160 by 200 m
built around a huge central
courtyard, entered via a monumental portal iwan
flanked by twin towers. Either side of the central
courtyard there were shallow iwans leading into
prayer halls roofed with fluted domes covered in
blue glazed tiles. The main prayer hall/sanctuary
with its massive tiled dome is hidden behind a
huge pishtaq iwan 40 m high and flanked with
twin towers more than 50 m high. Unfortunately
the speed of construction together with the
massive size of the mosque combined to make it
unstable and it started to disintegrate as soon as it
was built. The other major monument surviving
from Timur’s time is
the mausoleum of Gur-i Amir
built by Timur for his grandson Muhamad Sultan
between 1403 and 1404. This tomb eventually
housed Timur himself after his death on campaign
in 1405. The tomb is built on an octagonal plan
and is crowned with a bulbous dome resting on a
muqarnas band set on an octagonal drum. The
interior of the tomb is square with deeply recessed
arches set into the middle of each side. The dome
is supported on a network of eight intersecting
arches supported by corner squinches. On the floor
of the tomb are the cenotaphs of Timur’s
descendants, the tomb of Timur is marked by a
huge green jade slab.
Other funerary monuments erected by Timur
were part of a mausoleum
complex known as the
Shah i-Zinda. The complex was built around the
shrine of Quthman ibn Abbas whose tomb stood at
the end of a narrow lane approached by a set of
thirty-six stone steps. The shrine of Quthman is
approached through a series of anterooms decor-
ated with stucco and covered with a roof resting on
carved wooden columns. Either side of the lane
leading to the shrine there are a total of sixteen
tombs representing the development of tomb
architecture. The royal tombs are of two types: a
square type with a main façade and polygonal type
with two or more entrances. The oldest tomb, that
of Timur’s niece,
Shad i Mulk, is of the first type
with a large screen which hides the ribbed dome
behind. The screen is contained within two engaged
columns and frames a large recessed portal
decorated with muqarnas mouldings and glazed
tiles inset within carved mouldings. The tomb of
Shihrin Bika Aka was built some ten years later and
also has a screen façade although this is decorated
with tile mosaic, a new technique imported from
Persia. This tomb also has a more advanced dome
Mausoleum of Gur-i Amir, Samarkand, Uzbekistan
Samarkand
249
design which has a slightly bulbous form resting
on a sixteen-sided drum.
The centre of the city was the Registan, although
no buildings of Timur’s period survive in this
square, considered the finest in Central Asia. The
oldest building in the Registan is the madrassa of
Ulugh Beg built between 1417 and 1420. The
madrassa has the typical Timurid form with a huge
entrance iwan (pishtaq) set into an entrance façade
flanked with twin minarets. The entire surface of
the façade and minarets is decorated with blue,
turquoise and yellow tile mosaic against a
background of yellow/buff baked brick. One of the
notable features of the decoration
is the use of giant
calligraphic patterns in complex geometric
arrangements. The interior of the madrassa
consisted of a courtyard surrounded by two storeys
of cells and teaching rooms designed to
accommodate 100 students. Ulugh Beg’s love of
learning is further demonstrated by his observatory
which was a three-storey tiled structure nearly 50
m in diameter cut into the hillside. In the middle of
the building was a deep slit 40 m long which
contained a sextant with an arc of 63 m. With this
instrument Ulugh Beg was able to produce the first
precise map of the stars and planets.
Opposite the Ulugh Beg Madrassa in the Registan
is the Shirdar Madrassa
which has the same general
form even though it was built 200 years later in the
seventeenth century. On the third side of the square
is the Tilakar Mosque and Madrassa also built in the
seventeenth century. This building has the largest
façade, which is over 120 m long with a massive
entrance iwan (pishtaq) flanked on either side by two
storeys of open arches facing on to the square and
domed cylindrical corner turrets. Inside, the mosque
is decorated with multiple layers of gold painted on
to a blue background.
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