Persian Empire
Deep Dive 11 min read

Persian Architecture Styles: From Achaemenid Palaces to Safavid Mosques

The Taq Kasra at Ctesiphon is roughly 35 metres high, 25 metres wide, and 50 metres deep — the largest single-arch vault of the ancient world, and the most spectacular surviving piece of pre-Islamic Persian architecture. The parabolic brick vault, built without centring in the way the Romans would have used, was a feat of engineering that I think the Roman world never quite matched; the iwan of Khosrow’s palace at Ctesiphon, in the Mesopotamian alluvial plain south of Baghdad, is a piece of brick architecture on a scale that no European builder attempted before the Renaissance. The Taq Kasra was the model, in turn, for the iwans of the great Persian mosques of the Islamic east: the Masjid-i Jamiʿ of Isfahan, the Musalla of Herat, the Bibi Khanum of Samarkand. The line from Achaemenid columned halls to Safavid blue-tiled domes is one of the long continuities in world architecture.

The English literature begins with Arthur Upham Pope’s edited A Survey of Persian Art (six volumes, 1938–39, with the 1977 reprint still useful), Ernst Herzfeld’s Iran in the Ancient East (1941) and his archaeological reports on Pasargadae and Persepolis, Oleg Grabar’s The Formation of Islamic Art (1973) and Islamic Visual Culture (2006), Sheila Blair and Jonathan Bloom’s The Art and Architecture of Islam (1994), and Robert Hillenbrand’s Islamic Architecture: Form, Function and Meaning (1994). John Curtis’s chapter on Persepolis in The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Iran (2013) and the Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Iran journal are the standard archaeological references. The work of David Stronach on Pasargadae and of Margaret Cool Root on Achaemenid art is essential for the pre-Islamic period.

Achaemenid: Pasargadae, Persepolis, and Susa

Pasargadae, founded by Cyrus the Great in the late sixth century BCE in the plain of Murghab in Fars, is the earliest Achaemenid ensemble. Strabo (15.3.8) describes the site, and the modern excavations by David Stronach, beginning in 1961, recovered the major monuments: the Tall-e Takht, a fortified terrace; the audience hall of Cyrus, with its stone column bases; the two palace buildings with columned porches; the famous tomb of Cyrus on a six-stepped platform, a small gabled stone chamber about 11 by 7.2 metres. The gardens of Pasargadae, with their geometric four-part layout, are sometimes called the earliest chahar bagh (four-garden) — the term is anachronistic, but the principle is there.

The ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid Empire was Persepolis, founded by Darius I (r. 522–486 BCE) and developed by his successors Xerxes and Artaxerxes I. The great terrace, the takht, is a platform of dressed stone about 125,000 square metres, with the Apadana (the great hypostyle audience hall), the Throne Hall (the Hundred Columns), the Hadish of Artaxerxes II, the residential palace of Darius, and the Treasury. The Apadana had columns about 19–20 metres tall with double-headed animal capitals (bulls, lions, and human-headed bulls — the lamassu of Mesopotamian tradition adapted to the Achaemenid idiom), and the carved doorways are decorated with guardian figures and lotus motifs. Ernst Herzfeld excavated the site for the Oriental Institute in the 1930s, and the work has continued under the Oriental Institute and the Iranian Centre for Archaeological Research. The carved reliefs of the Apadana staircase, depicting the tribute-bearing delegations of the empire, are among the great monuments of ancient art and were studied in detail by Margaret Cool Root in The King and Kingship in Achaemenid Art (1979).

The Achaemenid palace at Susa, the winter capital, was excavated by the French archaeologists Roland de Morgan, Jacques de Morgan, and Roland de Mecquenem between 1897 and 1912, and the work has continued under Jean Perrot of the Louvre. The glazed-brick reliefs of the Immortals and the carved stone capitals are the principal surviving pieces. The site is identified with the biblical Shushan, mentioned in the Book of Daniel and in Xenophon’s Cyropaedia. The architecture is a deliberate synthesis: Egyptian-style cavetto cornices, Mesopotamian glazed brick, Greek-style fluting, and Persian-original double-animal capitals. This is not eclecticism but a programme of imperial art, in which the Achaemenid court was consciously creating a universal style.

Parthian and Sasanian: the iwan, the chahar taq, the vault

The Parthian period (247 BCE – 224 CE) is the dark age of Persian architecture. The Parthian kings built widely but in brick, and the surviving monuments are few. The Sasanian dynasty, which took power in 224 CE, restored Iranian monumental architecture to a level not seen since the Achaemenids, and the two most important Sasanian architectural inventions — the iwan and the chahar taq — became the defining forms of the Persian architectural tradition for the next millennium.

The iwan is a vaulted hall open on one side, framed by a monumental arched opening. The earliest Sasanian iwan is the one at Firuzabad, built by Ardashir I (r. 224–241 CE) in his new capital in Fars. The Taq Kasra at Ctesiphon, the iwan of the palace of Khosrow I Anushirvan (r. 531–579 CE), is the largest and most famous. The parabolic brick vault, with no internal support, was a feat of engineering that the Romans never equalled. The iwan became the characteristic element of Persian monumental architecture and, in the Islamic period, the dominant form of the great mosque.

The chahar taq is a square building with four arched openings and a domed roof supported on four columns, often free-standing and used as a Zoroastrian fire temple. The Sasanian chahar taq at Nain (in Isfahan province, often mislocated to Yazd in the older literature), at Firuzabad, and at various sites in Fars and Azerbaijan are direct ancestors of the great Islamic mausolea — the Samanid tomb at Bukhara (c. 905 CE), the Gunbad-i Qabus in Gonbad-e Qabus (1006 CE), the Kharaqan tombs. The Sasanian chahar taq is the form from which the Persian dome developed.

Other Sasanian contributions include the pointed brick arch, the squinch (a structural device for transitioning from a square base to a circular dome), the use of stucco ornament in domestic architecture, and the bridge-dam-aqueduct — the Band-e Kaisar at Shushtar, built under Valerian’s Roman-Persian joint programme of c. 260 CE, was the largest of its kind in the ancient world. The Sasanian road system, with its regular stations, milestones, and caravanserais, was among the more developed of the pre-modern world, and the caravanserai of Bishapur and the Ribat-i Sharaf on the road from Nishapur to Merv are major works of monumental architecture in their own right.

Early Islamic: the four-iwan plan

The Arab conquest of the Sasanian Empire in 651 CE brought Islam to Iran. The new rulers, while Arab in language and faith, relied on Persian builders and adopted Persian forms. The earliest great mosques of Iran — the Masjid-i Jamiʿ of Isfahan, the Masjid-i Jamiʿ of Neyshabur, the Great Mosque of Kufa, the Great Mosque of Damascus — are based on the Sasanian hypostyle hall: a large courtyard surrounded by arcaded porches, with a monumental iwan on one or each of the four cardinal sides. The pointed brick arch, the brick dome, the muqarnas (honeycomb vaulting), and the stucco ornament of the Sasanian tradition were adapted to the new religious building type and given an Islamic decorative vocabulary of calligraphy, geometric pattern, and vegetal scroll.

The four-iwan madrasa plan — a central courtyard with four vaulted iwans, each opening onto a vaulted student cell — is a later development. It is sometimes attributed to the Seljuks, but the plan is more accurately associated with the Khwarezmian and Timurid periods; the madrasa of Ulugh Beg in Samarkand (1417–1420) is the early classic. The Seljuks developed the four-iwan courtyard for the masjid-i jamiʿ (the great congregational mosque), not the madrasa; the madrasa is a Khwarezmian and Timurid innovation.

The Samanid Mausoleum at Bukhara (c. 905 CE) is the earliest surviving example of a distinctively Islamic Iranian architectural style. Its compact form, its use of brick as both structure and decoration, and its integration of calligraphy and geometric pattern became the model for the funerary architecture of Iran and Central Asia for centuries. The Ghaznavid and Qarakhanid dynasties of eastern Iran and Central Asia built in the same tradition.

Seljuk: the golden age of Persian building

The Seljuk period (11th–12th centuries) is often called the golden age of Persian architecture. The Masjid-i Jamiʿ of Isfahan, repeatedly rebuilt and expanded under the Seljuks, acquired its present form during this period: a vast complex of four iwans, domes, and minarets with an outstanding programme of stucco, brick, and tile ornament. The Masjid-i Jamiʿ of Neyshabur, the Masjid-i Jamiʿ of Qazvin, and the Ribat-i Sharaf on the Nishapur-Merv road are other major works of the period. Seljuk caravanserais, with their monumental iwan portals, vaulted halls, and corner towers, are major works of monumental architecture in their own right; the Ribat-i Sharaf (c. 1154) is the most famous.

Ilkhanid, Timurid, and Safavid tilework

The Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century destroyed much of the Iranian plateau, but the Ilkhanid dynasty that emerged was a major patron of architecture. The Mausoleum of Oljaytu at Sultaniyya (1304–1313), with its great blue-tiled dome about 49 metres high, is one of the masterpieces of medieval Islamic architecture. The Ilkhanid tradition of haft-rang (seven-colour) tilework, in which the surface of a building is covered with glazed tiles cut into small pieces and assembled into a mosaic, shaped Persian architectural decoration for centuries to come. Sheila Blair’s The Monumental Inscriptions of the Mongol Period (2006) and the survey by Robert Hillenbrand (Islamic Architecture: Form, Function and Meaning, 1994) are the working references for the Iranian side.

The Timurid dynasty of the fifteenth century, with its capital at Herat, refined the tilework tradition to an extraordinary level. The Musalla complex at Herat, the Shah-i Zinda at Samarkand, the Bibi Khanum mosque at Samarkand, and the Goharshad mosque at Herat are the high points of Timurid architecture, with their massive iwans, double-shelled domes, and elaborate tilework programmes. The Timurid dome — a double shell on a high drum, with an internal geometric pattern that is visible from inside — became the standard form of the Persian dome.

The Safavid dynasty of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with its capital at Isfahan, brought Persian architecture to its supreme expression. The Naqsh-e Jahan Square, designed by Shaykh Bahai under Shah ʿAbbas I, is the focal point of a great urban ensemble that includes the royal mosque (Masjid-i Shah), the Sheikh Lotfollah mosque, the Ali Qapu palace, and the Qeysariyya bazaar. The Masjid-i Shah, with its great blue-tiled dome and four monumental iwans, is among the most ambitious religious buildings of the early modern world.

Materials, techniques, and decoration

Persian architecture is, in most of the country, a brick architecture. Mud brick and fired brick were the principal materials of the Iranian plateau, and Persian builders developed an extraordinary range of brick-bonding patterns, vaulting techniques, and decorative revetments. Stone was used in the Achaemenid period and in regions where it was locally available — in the Zagros, in the Alvand, in the Elburz — but in most of the plateau, brick remained the structural medium of choice. The development of the pointed arch, the squinch, the muqarnas, and the double-shell dome are all, in part, products of working with brick.

Tilework — the application of glazed tiles to the surface of a building — became in the Islamic period the characteristic decorative medium. The earliest Islamic tilework in Iran, the cuerda seca and minaʾi wares of the Seljuk period, used coloured glazes to create figure and floral patterns on the surface of brick buildings. The haft-rang technique of the Ilkhanid and Timurid periods, and the mosaic faience of the Safavid period, allowed architects to cover entire surfaces of buildings in complex figured and floral designs. The girih geometric strapwork, the islimi vegetal scroll, the khatam inlaid woodwork, the moʿarraq inlaid tilework, and the khataʾi floral arabesque are the principal elements of the Persian decorative vocabulary. Each has a long history, with roots in the Achaemenid, Sasanian, and early Islamic periods, and each was refined and developed by successive generations of Persian builders and craftsmen.

The muqarnas — the honeycomb vaulting of small niches in a tiered, three-dimensional arrangement — is a defining element of Persian architectural decoration. The form originated in the early Islamic period (the 10th–11th centuries, in Iran and North Africa — the Maghrebi examples at the Qalawunid complexes in Cairo and the Alhambra are as early as the Iranian) and reached its highest development in the Ilkhanid, Timurid, and Safavid periods. The muqarnas of the Shah-i Zinda in Samarkand, of the Goharshad mosque in Herat, and of the Masjid-i Shah in Isfahan are among the great masterpieces of the tradition.

Bridges, caravanserais, and the public architecture of the roads

The Persians were also great builders of bridges, caravanserais, dams, and other public works. The Sasanian bridges of Khuzistan, the band-e Kaisar (Bridge of Caesar) at Shushtar — a combined bridge-dam-aqueduct that was the largest of its kind in the ancient world — are major works of engineering. The Sasanian road system, with its regular stations, milestones, and caravanserais, was among the more developed of the pre-modern world.

The Islamic period saw a continued development of the bridge, caravanserai, and dam tradition. The Seljuk, Ilkhanid, and Timurid rulers built great bridges across the major rivers. The Safavid rulers built a network of caravanserais across the Iranian plateau, and the Bazaar of Isfahan and the Bazaar of Tabriz remain major centres of the trade. The tradition of public building — of road maintenance, of caravanserai construction, of bridge building — is one of the great continuities of the Persian architectural tradition and one of the foundations of the Persian trade and economy for more than two thousand years.

For further reading

  • Pope, Arthur Upham, ed. A Survey of Persian Art (1938–39, reprinted 1977).
  • Herzfeld, Ernst. Iran in the Ancient East (1941) and his archaeological reports on Pasargadae and Persepolis.
  • Grabar, Oleg. The Formation of Islamic Art (1973) and Islamic Visual Culture (2006).
  • Blair, Sheila, and Jonathan Bloom. The Art and Architecture of Islam (1994).
  • Hillenbrand, Robert. Islamic Architecture: Form, Function and Meaning (1994).
  • Stronach, David. Pasargadae (1969), with subsequent reports in Iran and Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Iran.
  • Curtis, John. The Persepolis chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Iran (2013).
  • Root, Margaret Cool. The King and Kingship in Achaemenid Art (1979).
  • Canepa, Matthew P. The Two Eyes of the Earth: Art and Ritual of Kingship between Rome and Sasanian Iran (2009).