The Samanid Mausoleum in Bukhara

The mausoleum is small — about ten metres on each side, with walls 1.8 metres thick — but carefully proportioned. Four identical facades, each with an arched entrance, rise between engaged corner columns to an arcaded gallery; the hemispherical main dome, flanked by four small corner domes, rests on squinches that carry it from the square to an octagon. Baked brick, laid flat, on edge and at angles, is at once structure and ornament, forming basket-weave and herringbone patterns and borders of rosettes. Scholars see in the building a blend of traditions: the four-arched fire temple (chahar taq) of Sasanian Iran, the fortress-like corner buttresses of Sogdian architecture and a tomb over a grave, which Islamic law at first frowned upon.

Its date is disputed. Tradition linked it with Ismail Samani, and a waqf deed known from a copy made in 1568–1569 records that Ismail gave land in the Naukanda cemetery for a funerary building for his father, Ahmad. During restoration in 1937–1939 (or, by another account, in 1940), however, a wooden lintel over the entrance was found with a fragment of a Kufic inscription read as “…Nasr ibn Ahmad ibn Ismail” — the name of Ismail’s grandson Nasr II — and other scholars therefore date the building to his reign; some suppose that the board was brought from another tomb when burials were moved. Three burials were found inside.

The tomb stood in a large Samanid necropolis that decayed after the fall of the dynasty; half buried under earth and later graves, it is believed to have escaped the Mongol sack of Bukhara in 1220. Archaeologists and architects studied it from 1924 and restored it in the 1920s and 1930s. It is part of the Historic Centre of Bukhara, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1993.