The Mughals, Uzbeks, and the Timurid Legacy

Abstract

This chapter analyzes the most emblematic of Mughal monuments to determine what aspects might have been intended to evoke Timurid architecture. The systematic study of Timurid architecture began with the invasion of the czarist Russian armies into the Timurid heartland in the second half of the nineteenth century. The government sponsored ambitious projects to conserve these impressive buildings. This activity was continued under the Soviet governments of the newly formed republics of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan. Most Timurid cities had a fortified citadel, usually tangent to the city walls. In Samarqand the citadel lay just south of the Registan square. The Timurid building type that illustrates a love for symmetry is the centralized plan of eight parts around a central core, the hasht-bihisht (eight heavens). The chapter discusses the features which represent innovative techniques of construction under the Timurids that eventually became standard features of Central Asian, Iranian, and, in a modified form, Mughal architecture.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 8 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.