Page:From Constantinople to the home of Omar Khayyam.djvu/309

 monly attributed to Shah Abbas, although it may date back a century earlier, to the time of the Safavid monarch Shah Ismail, who died in 1624.1 To the east and south of the fastness spreads the city in its wider extent, marked by two towering minarets at widely separated points. The nearer one is more noticeable because its top has been partially preserved; the more distant tower has lost its top completely. Both of these structures are worthy of a more detailed description, and each will be presented in turn.

The minaret which lies nearest to the citadel, in an easterly direction, and whose top has been partially preserved, adjoins the chief mosque of the town, and is accordingly known as the Minar-i Masjid-i Jami*. It belongs to the eleventh century, and has the characteristic features of the earlier Seljuk archi- tecture, although the mosque itself, called that of Imam Husain, dates from a later time.^ This graceful minaret springs from a square surface, and towers aloft, with a tapering cylindrical shaft, for about a hundred feet.^ It is capped by the remains of a pinnacle turret, still recognizable by the vestiges of an octagonal column and a broken wooden platform on which the muazzin stood to raise his call to prayer. The lofty shaft is composed of eight drums, or sections, faced with unburnt bricks in artistic designs and separated from each other by

1 The former statement, ascribing same work, Texthand^ p. 112, 1910 ; the work, as so often throughout Per- cf. also Khanikoff, Memoire sur la sia, to Shah Abbas, a prince of build- partie meridionale de VAsie centrale, ers, was the one that was made tome; p. 75, Paris (1861), 1862. The date but Nasir ad-Din Shah (Diary, p. 77) of the city mosque is given by East- speaks of the edifice as 'a beautiful wick (2. 163) as 1119 a.h. = 1707 a.d. caravansarai, said to be one of the " The number of steps mounted in buildings of Shah Ismail.' On the the interior is 105, according to the date of Shah Ismail see Horn, Gesch. ciUtion by Sarre (op. cit. p. 112) from Irans in islam. Zeit, in Grundr. iran. the Matla'- ash-Shams, tr. by Eugen Philol. 2. 579-581. Mittwoch under the title Ort wo die

2 For illustrations and details of Sonne aufgeht (not accessible to me). these minarets see Sarre, Denkmdler The number '106 steps' is given by persischer Baukunst, Lieferung 3, p. x Eastwick, 2. 153.

(plate Ixxxiii), Berlin, 1901, and the

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