The minaret of Jam is raised in Ghor

The minaret stands where the Jam River meets the Hari Rud in the mountains of Ghor, in central Afghanistan. Built entirely of baked brick, it is about 65 m high (some measurements give 62 m) and is covered with geometric ornament and alternating bands of Kufic and naskh calligraphy: verses of the Quran, among them the Surah Maryam, and the names and titles of the Ghurid sultan Ghiyath al-Din Muhammad ibn Sam (1163–1203).

The inscription giving the date can be read in two ways, as the Hijri year 570 or 590 — that is, 1174/75 or 1193/94 — and the minaret is often dated to about 1190. Some scholars think it commemorated a Ghurid victory: over the Ghaznavids in 1186 or, as Ralph Pinder-Wilson suggested, the triumph of Mu’izz al-Din at Tarain in 1192. It probably belonged to the Friday mosque of Firuzkuh, the Ghurid capital, which many scholars locate at Jam; archaeological work around the minaret has revealed palace ruins and a Jewish cemetery with Hebrew tombstones, traces of a medieval town.

Reported in 1886, the minaret became widely known in 1957 through the French archaeologists André Maricq and Gaston Wiet. In 2002 it became Afghanistan’s first World Heritage Site and was at once placed on the List of World Heritage in Danger, threatened by erosion, floods and earthquakes.