Gonbad-e Qabus

The tower was ordered by Shams al-Ma'ali Qabus ibn Voshmgir, the fourth Ziyarid emir². He ruled Gorgan from 978, spent 981-998 in exile in Khorasan, and in 1012 was deposed by his troops in favour of his son Manuchehr; he died soon after^3,5,7,9,10. A scholar and poet, he drew scholars to Jorjan, and al-Biruni dedicated his Chronology of Ancient Nations to him around 1000². His grandson Kaykavus wrote the Qabus-nama, a Persian book of advice, in 1082⁸. Two Kufic bands on the shaft record that Qabus ordered this “lofty palace” built in his lifetime, in the lunar year 397 and the solar year 375, that is 1006-1007^2,4,6.

The tower outlived Jorjan, which UNESCO says was destroyed in the Mongol invasions¹. In 1821-1822 the British traveller James Baillie Fraser recorded a local story, later attached to Nadir Shah, of a king who began to pull the tower down and then spared it⁴. Russia set up a customs post on the mound in 1882; in 1899 Russian investigators sank a shaft into the base looking for a burial and found only brickwork^2,3,4. Brick robbing and gunfire damaged the base and cone; repairs in the 1920s were followed by a larger restoration in 1937-1939^2,4. A new town was laid out around it in 1926, and UNESCO inscribed it on the World Heritage List in 2012^1,2.

The tower is built entirely of unglazed fired brick^1,2. Its plan is a ten-pointed star: ten triangular flanges run up a hollow cylinder that narrows from 17 m across at the base to 15.5 m below the roof, with walls 3 m thick². The flanges stop under a corbelled cornice, above which a brick cone rises 18 m, half the height of the shaft². Iran’s heritage authorities describe the roof as a double shell, a conical roof over an inner dome, its two layers joined and parting slightly at the apex^2,3,4. The whole stands 53 m high on a brick foundation 9.8 m deep, on top of a mound about 10 m high^1,2.

The only ornament outside is the pair of Kufic inscription bands in relief brick, one just below the cornice and one a little above the base, both once plastered². Encyclopaedia Iranica notes that this foundation text, written in rhymed prose, is unusual for its time in describing the building with an adjective⁶. UNESCO treats the conical-roofed tower as the prototype for the tomb towers of Iran, Anatolia and Central Asia, and ICOMOS adds that the Seljuk tombs of Anatolia known as kümbets repeated the model in stone^1,2.

Two steps lead up to a narrow arched doorway 5.6 m high, then a small recess and a second arch 4.3 m high, with muqarnas decoration above it on either side². Inside is a single hollow shaft, round in plan and rising unbroken to the roof, with no stairs; a small arched opening 2 m wide, high on the east side of the cone, is said to have been made to admit the rising sun^2,4. Plaster survives only from 7-8 m above the floor to the apex; lower down much of the wall is bare brick, and the floor is not original². No burial chamber was found in 1899 or in 1936². The 11th-century historian al-Utbi placed Qabus’s grave under a dome outside Jorjan on the Khorasan road; the 16th-century Ottoman writer al-Jannabi’s tale of his body hanging here in a glass coffin is a legend⁴.