An isolated innovation was the triple dome used in the mausoleum of Gawhar Shad in Herat, but the added inner dome was purely decorative, with no structural function.
The iwan now acquired the function of a monumental entrance hall. Two iwans were usually built back-to-back, one facing into the courtyard, the other turned outwards. A splendid decorated façade, with the iwan in the middle, was part of the general emphasis on the outer appearance and visual impression, which went hand-in-hand with the colossal dimensions of the buildings.
Generally speaking, this trend towards the colossal and the conspicuous became the characteristic features of the Timurid period, often to the detriment of the quality of construction or the attention to detail – although some scholars find the combination of architectural masses, decorative designs and colour schemes to be in perfect balance.36
This may be true of some of the smaller and more intimate buildings in Samarkand (Ishrat Khana or Shah-i Zinda), but it could hardly apply to such rambling structures as the Bibi Khanum mosque, and even less to the much cruder buildings and their decoration in Herat or in Balkh.
This tendency towards the colossal continued for some time under the Uzbek khans in Transoxania, where a notable addition to the previous style was the exceedingly high pishtak wall (the front wall of the iwan). Buildings of this kind were contemporary with the Safavid monuments in Isfahan, but on the whole lagged behind them both in their design and in their decoration.
In urban design, the Timurid and post-Timurid era contributed the notion of the monumental square, an open space surrounded by large, impressive buildings and conveying a sense of proportion and harmony, as well as greatness. The Registan in Samarkand, the somewhat later Labi-Hauz complex in Bukhara and the Maydan-i Shah in Isfahan (laid out in 1598) were expressions of the same idea.
The Timurid gardens were based on the Iranian principle of the chahar bagh (four gardens), that is symmetrically laid out squares divided by water channels, with straight rows of trees and shrubs lined with flower beds. They can still be seen in the Babur Gardens in Kabul and in their later imitations in Srinagar, Lahore and elsewhere in India.
Finally, a special bazaar building made its appearance in this period. Its standard plan was the so-called chahar-su (four rivers) – sometimes rendered as chahar-suq (four markets) – consisting of two passageways intersecting each other at right angles, covered by a dome at the crossing. Small apertures in the vaulted roof let in sufficient light, yet kept out the intense heat in summer and retained warmth in winter. Buildings of this kind seem to have had a long tradition in the area.
In contrast to architecture, the decoration, and in particular the ornament, changed considerably.
The main new factor was the introduction of glazed tiles and the ever increasing range of colours. The basic three colours, turquoise, royal blue, and white, were followed by black, red and yellow, as well as other shades of green and blue. The larger ornaments were again executed in small bricks, which were not glazed (the so-called banai-technique). More sophisticated ornaments were composed of mosaic panels made of a number of small particles of various sizes and shapes. The monochrome carved, or incised, terracotta of the previous period was now glazed and polychrome. As for the motifs, banai-technique was mainly used for geometrical ornaments and large Kufic inscriptions. Complicated girikhs based on intertwined patterns of pentagons, hexagons or octagons appeared on flat and spherical surfaces. Floral motifs were widely used, in particular on arches, vaults and spandrels. Chinese motifs – stylised dragons, clouds and mountains – sometimes appeared among purely vegetal ornaments. In calligraphy, the highly decorative Thulth style was added to the Kufic and Naskhi, but in general the inscriptions of this period are inferior to the elegance and variety of the monochrome bands of the previous age.
Painted decoration seems to have been fairly rare. Few specimens have been preserved, some in Samarkand and Shahrisabz, in the Masjid-i Shah in Mashad and in the Zarnigar Khana of Gazurgah in Herat, all dating from the second half of the fifteenth and the first half of the sixteenth century. The motifs were mainly floral, in medallion and band form, with some affinity to carpet design and miniature painting.
The trend seems to have been reversed as regards the origin of the motifs. Whereas in the previous period architectural ornaments were often imitated in other crafts: pottery, textiles etc. – it now seems as though architecture preferred to use motifs already developed elsewhere, especially in carpet knotting and book decoration.
The totally flat decoration inspired by book illustration dominated the field. To quote Melikian-Chirvani,37 the decoration became ‘totally independent from architecture itself … in accordance with the general tendency of the Timurid century where art of the book prevailed over all other arts’. It was the surface alone that mattered, and it had to be a flat surface. Consequently, all architectural decoration disappeared, except some examples of corner colonettes with capitals, which can be seen on the Timurid mausoleums in Samarkand and in a much cruder form on the Green Mosque in Balkh.
Under Shah Rukh and Husayn Baykara the art of the miniature and book illumination reached its peak. In Herat, a distinct Timurid style developed, with the famous Bihzad as its supreme master. After Herat fell to the Uzbeks in 1507, Bihzad moved to Tabriz, to the court of Shah Tahmasp who, as a boy, had spent several years in Herat. Tabriz had been, for some time, the home of a rival miniaturist school, that of the Turkmen, which was considerably influenced by Chinese and Indian art. Under the shah, who became acquainted with its artists and himself became a keen painter during his stay in Herat, the refined classical Timurid style co-existed in Tabriz with the much wilder and rougher Turkmen idiom. Eventually, a synthesis of the two styles emerged in the person of Sultan Muhammad, a Tabriz painter whose pictures, in their refinement and psychological characterisation might even surpass Bihzad’s.38
Little is known about carpet-knotting and design in the Herat period. However, the change brought about in the traditional carpet patterns in Tabriz by the arrival of Shah Tahmasp was in many ways similar to the change in the art of the miniature. The early carpets that were introduced to Western Asia by the Turkish tribes had a geometrical, primitively abstract decoration, which, by repeating the same motif, tried to break out of the limited space available. The Turkish abstract patterns that dominated all rug design up to the end of the fifteenth century were enlivened by floral ornaments, while in Iran they were replaced by figurative and floral motifs, often set within a pattern of arabesques surrounding a central medallion. The medallion style was created not by the weavers, but rather by the painters and illuminators of the court school. The large characteristic central medallions served to give the rugs a monumental character. Some of them were of supreme simplicity and austerity, others were more elaborate, with a great variety of decorative motifs. The carpet design was often taken from drawings by well-known painters. Persian workshops were producing carpets with magnificent compositions, sumptuous decor and dazzling colours, in which the subject became more and more important. Hunting carpets and animal carpets developed at that time, showing scenes of animals fighting among trees and plants, or being chased by hunters.
When Babur became the first Mongul emperor of India, Kabul and eastern Afghanistan were open to an ever-increasing Indian influence. This lasted until the invasion of the Persian Nadir Shah in the eighteenth century, after which the local Turco-Iranian traditions again prevailed.
Little of historical interest remains of that period except the Babur Gardens in Kabul, already mentioned. In architecture, the most remarkable building showing strong Indian influence is the mausoleum of Hazret Ali in Mazar-i Sharif. It was originally built in the Timurid style, but acquired an increasingly Indian appearance as a result of subsequent additions, restorations and rebuilding, which has gone on until recently.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, wall paintings with subjects such as landscapes and buildings appeared alongside purely
ornamental motifs. The holy places of Islam seem to have been the favourite subject. Golombek39 distinguished between two different styles, one from the mid-seventeenth century, the other from the eighteenth or even early nineteenth century, the main difference being the emphasis on line in the first, on area colour in the second.
Paintings of both styles have been preserved in the shrine of Gazurgah in Herat.
Although in the nineteenth century Khiva wood carving on doors and wooden support columns of the traditional ayvan (iwan) was of a very high quality, few comparable specimens can be found in contemporary Afghanistan.
In Afghanistan, the period from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards may be regarded as a period of national independence, but culturally it was an era of decadence. The tribal oligarchy that ruled the country had neither the financial means nor the cultural background to foster artistic activity of any significance.
Although not in any way outstanding, the mosque of Takht-i Pol near Balkh, with its Indianised architecture and interior decoration, is the most interesting building from that period.
Yet, while all artistic activity seemed to be at a standstill in Afghanistan from the early sixteenth century onwards, this was not the case in the neighbouring territories of Turkestan and northern India. The Uzbek khans, when forced to retreat beyond the Amu Darya, established their residence in Bukhara, and it was in this city as well as in post-Timurid Samarkand that the first two centuries of Uzbek rule brought about a number of interesting contributions to the local brand of Islamic architecture and ornament. There was little innovation in the art of building itself, as all monumental structures of that period continued to be built by traditional methods and in the traditional idiom, but the range of ornamental motifs and the techniques of decoration changed and expanded considerably until, in the eighteenth century, decadence set in and the general atmosphere began to resemble that of Afghanistan. After that, with the exception of some isolated specimens, like the khan’s palace in Kokand (1876), it was the curious, unexpected and short-lived flowering of nineteenth-century Khiva, an isolated oasis near the Aral Sea, that kept the Persian creative genius alive in all that enormous area east of Iran itself.
An entirely different picture emerged in northern India, where Moghul architecture appeared as an entirely new style. It blended Islamic traditions ranging from the Ghaznavid and Ghorid to the late Timurid with the indigenous Indian, or Hinduistic, ones. The traditional Iranian models were either abandoned or changed beyond recognition. The four-iwan mosque gave way to the three-hall mosque (itself perhaps a late reappearance of the ancient triple-iwan), the bulbous cupola became onion-shaped, the broken arch gave way to the horseshoe arch. The Iranian sobriety, linearity and flatness were supplanted by the Indian profusion or ornamentalism, naturalism and a much less thorough attention to architectural and technical detail. The Iranian technique of mosaic faience was replaced by inlaid stone, first sandstone inlaid with marble, and later marble inlaid with semi-precious stones. The glazed tiles persisted for some time, mainly as painted medallion panels, but in a much cruder and less refined form. Red sandstone inlaid with white marble became a typical, and effective, element of flat wall decoration. Ornamental panels composed of simple geometrical patterns of clearly Islamic origin were still to be found. Next to them, however, other panels of the same material carried symbolic images and motifs of a predominantly indigenous Hinduistic character.
* * *
NOTES ON CHAPTER IV
Full details of abbreviations and publications are in the Bibliography.
1 Ghirshman, Iran, p.135.
2 Ghirshman, Iran, p.165.
3 Ghirshman, Iran, p.166.
4 Ghirshman, Iran, p.167.
5 Ghirshman, Iran, p.232.
6 Franz, G.H., ‘Der Buddhistische Stupa in Afghanistan’, AFJ 4/4/1977 and AFJ 5/1/1978.
7 Fischer, K., Schöpfungen der indischen Kunst.
8 Barthoux, J.J., ‘Les Fouilles de Hadda’, Mem. DAFA IV, 1933.
9 K. Fischer sees in the lantern ceiling an element of Central Asian wooden architecture: Schöpfungen der indischen Kunst.
10 Dupree, L., Afghanistan, p.296.
11 Frumkin, G., ‘Archaeology’, CAR XIII, p.253.
12 Marshall, J., Taxila I, p.75; II, p.520.
13 Ghirshman, Iran, p.273.
14 Ghirshman, Iran, p.276.
15 Frumkin, CAR XIV, p.77.
16 For a detailed description of the squinch, see Pope, Persian Architecture, p.256.
17 Ghirshman, Iran, p.322.
18 Ghirshman, Iran, p.322.
19 Frumkin, CAR XIII, p.252.
20 Bosworth, C.E., The Development of Persian Culture, p.34.
21 Bosworth, Culture, p.34.
22 Creswell, K.A.C., Early Muslim Architecture.
23 Ettinghausen, R., ‘The Man-made Setting’, in The World of Islam, p.72.
24 Vogt-Göknil, U., Les grands courants de l’architecture islamique, p.72.
25 See Rabat-i Malik, nr. Bukhara, described by Pope in Architecture, p.129.
26 Grabar, O., Islamic Architecture, p.76.
27 Vogt-Göknil, Les grands courants, p.121.
28 Pope, Architecture, p.259.
29 Grabar, Architecture, p.74.
30 Grabar, Architecture, p.75.
31 Grabar, Architecture, p.75.
32 Grabar, Architecture, p.75.
33 Grabar, Architecture, p.77ff.
34 Ettinghausen, Man-made Setting, p.58.
35 Schlumberger, D., ‘Le palais ghaznévide de Lashkar-i Bazar’, Syria, XXIX, 1952.
36 Grabar, Architecture, p.75.
37 Melikian-Chirvani, ‘Eastern Iranian Architecture’, BSOAS XXXIII, 1970.
38 Welch, S.C., King’s Book of Kings, p.54.
39 Golombek, L., The Timurid Shrine at Gazur Gah, p.67ff.
V
THE SOURCES
The sources providing information about the country’s past can be classified into four different categories: the accounts of travellers, geographers, historians, and authentic local documents.
Important deposits of ancient documents were found in various places in Xinjiang, mostly in cave temples, at Mount Mug near Pendzhikent, and also, to some extent, at Toprak-Kala in Khorezm. They relate on the whole to the Kushan and Soghdian periods and deal mostly with religious and commercial matters. They are written in various languages and scripts, and many of those discovered have not yet been deciphered; others, although deciphered and translated, still await publication. More about these may be found on pp.75 and 170, but the formidable philological problems that they pose are beyond the scope of this book.
For the ancient period we have isolated remarks on the Scythians in Herodotus, Ptolemy, and Strabo. Ammianus Marcellinus and Sidonius Apollinaris wrote about the history of the Hunnic invasion of Europe. The invasion of China by another tribe of Huns was the subject of a work by the Chinese historian Sseu-ma Tsien and all three have left an extremely valuable description of these fifth-century nomads.
There is no evidence of any historical treatises in Central Asia in the pre-Arab period. If al-Biruni (eleventh century) is to be believed, the Arabs systematically exterminated all priests – that is literate and learned people – in Persia, Soghd, and Khorezm and their books perished with them. All we have, therefore, are accounts of pilgrims like Fa-Sien, a Buddhist monk, who with some of his fellow students set out across the Gobi desert in AD 399, reached India and returned to China by sea ten years later. Other Chinese Buddhists, Song Yun in 518–21, and Suen-Tsang (Hsuen-tsang) in 629–30, travelled to India and back by the land route. There are also the reports of Byzantine envoys – Zemarchos, Eutychios, Valentinos, Herodian, and Paul of Cilicia – who, one after the other, were all sent by the emperor to the khan of the Turks in the second half of the sixth century. Theophylactes Simocatta summarised Byzantine-Turkish relations in his historical work. Other sixth-century historians, Procopios of Cesarea and Menandros Protector, giv
e some information about the Hephthalites. There is also the Armenian chronicle of Sebeos. The Chinese chronicles Suei chou and T’ang chou contribute their side of the picture.
With the arrival of the Arabs there begins a steady flow of historical and geographical literature, written both in Arabic and in Persian, and admirably summarised by Barthold.1 Unfortunately, most of it is obscured by frequent rewriting and compilations. So, for example, the work of the fourteenth-century compiler Abu’l Fida is based almost completely on a previous compilation from the early thirteenth century by Ibn al-Athir, who in his turn used texts of yet earlier compilations, especially that of Tabari (late ninth and early tenth centuries). Another compilation is that of Ibn Khalikan (thirteenth century), which has been translated into English under the title Biographical Dictionary. A list of Arabic historians can be found in Masudi’s tenth-century encyclopaedia, The Golden Meadows, and in the vast bibliography of the same century called The Fihrist. The Arab conquest is the subject of a ninth-century historianm Baladhuri. Other ninth-century histories are those of Yakubi and Abu Hanifa. Ibn Khurdadbih, also writing in the ninth century, may be described as the earliest Arab geographer.
In the tenth century, the Samanids patronised writers, scholars, and especially Persian poets. Tha’alibi, who died in about 1037, produced an anthology of the poets of Khorassan and Transoxania. He described Bukhara as ‘the home of glory, the Ka’aba of sovereignty, the place of assembly of all eminent people of the age’. He quotes in his autobiography his contemporary, the famous Avicenna (Ibn Sina), who described the library of the Samanids:
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