The Samanid Mausoleum at Bukhara

The Samanid Mausoleum at Bukhara is one of the earliest and finest works of Islamic architecture in Central Asia, raised in the early fourth century AH (early tenth century CE) for the Samanid dynasty and traditionally associated with Ismail Samani, the ruler who made Bukhara a great capital. The Samanids were a Persian dynasty who governed Khurasan and Transoxiana from Bukhara and Samarqand under the nominal suzerainty of the Abbasid caliph, and their court was the cradle of the New Persian literary renaissance and a stronghold of Sunni learning on the Central Asian frontier, the world that produced poets like Rudaki and, a little later, the young Ibn Sina. The mausoleum is a small, perfect cube of baked brick topped by a single hemispherical dome, freestanding and complete in itself. Its genius is that structure and ornament are the same thing: the bricks are laid in basketweave and geometric bonds that animate every surface with light and shadow, with engaged columns at the corners and an arcaded gallery of small arches running below the roofline. Inside, squinches gather the square plan up into the circle of the dome. The form descends from the pre-Islamic Sogdian and Sasanian domed-cube building, the fire-temple chahar-taq of Iranian Central Asia, here reinterpreted entirely in Islamic brick and without any figural image. The building's exact date is debated among scholars, which is why it is given here only approximately. It survived the centuries, including the Mongol storm that destroyed so much of the region, partly because it had been buried in drifted earth, and it stands today as the signature monument of Samanid Bukhara. This scene depicts the mausoleum on its open ground: the patterned brick cube under its low dome, the corner columns and the arcaded band near the roof, the meeting of the old Iranian East and the new Muslim architecture of Central Asia.