Gonbad-e Ali

Abarkuh, an important town of medieval northern Fars, later declined because it lay off the main routes¹. After taking Isfahan in 1051, the Seljuk Toghril Beg gave Abarkuh and Yazd to the Kakuyid amir he had dispossessed³. Hillenbrand says the inscription dates the tower to 448 AH (1056-57) and names ʿAmid al-Din Shams al-Dawla and his mother as its occupants, and he calls him a Daylamite prince of the local Kakuyid dynasty¹. Bosworth's Iranica history of the town instead links the tower to the Firuzanids, another Daylamite or Mazandarani family from Eshkavar in Tabarestan³. Archnet also calls the family Firuzanid, says ʿAmid al-Din's son Firuzan built the tomb, and dates it to 447 AH (1055-56)².

Hillenbrand counts the tower among the earliest and most individual of the great Iranian tomb towers, and sees in its octagonal plan and rubble masonry, alien to central Iran, Caspian influences that he explains by the Daylamite origin of the man buried there¹. Bosworth calls it the town's oldest surviving monument³. A second inscription, over the doorway, calls the woman buried here 'sayyida', but her full name cannot be read². Later visitors heard older stories: Colonel MacGregor, who passed through in 1875, recorded that the tower was attributed to Khosrow V, and an ancient origin was also claimed for nearby ruins such as the Dakhma-ye Darab¹.

The tower stands on the summit of a small desert hill about 3 km east of Abarkuh, on the road to Yazd, at the very edge of a rocky spur that juts into the plain^1,2. An octagonal chamber rises from a low base with eight unequal sides; the four longer sides of the base are flush with four faces of the chamber, which tapers, so that the tower is wider at the foot than under the cornice². It is built almost entirely of roughly dressed rubble stone, with brick only in the inscriptions and the inner dome^1,2. The walls are left plain, and the ornament is kept for the entrance and the cornice².

The cornice is a tall muqarnas that steps outward in tiers (two according to Hillenbrand, three according to Archnet), with a Kufic band below it naming the builder and the person commemorated^1,2. Hillenbrand notes that its letters are built up laboriously from cut-brick segments and were never softened with a coat of stucco¹. The doorway, on the north-east side, sits in a deep niche under a semi-vault within a rectangular frame; of its two flanking columns only the sockets remain². The tower is now domed, but Archnet suggests that the projecting cornice once carried a pyramidal roof, as was usual for tombs in this region².

The octagonal chamber is bare, has no crypt and is faced with the same rubble as the outside². A band of niches, two on each side, runs below the drum, and eight simple squinches at the corners carry the dome; Hillenbrand sees in them a faint echo of the cornice outside^1,2. Four openings in the dome and a window in one side light the room². Against one wall are the remains of a plaster mihrab, which Hillenbrand takes to be a later addition because of its awkward, skewed position; the tomb's qibla is 35 degrees out of true^1,2.