Naqsh-e Jahan Square Rising in Isfahan

Around 1602 (1011 AH) the great rectangular maydan known as Naqsh-e Jahan, the Image of the World, was being laid out at the heart of Isfahan, the city Shah Abbas I of the Safavid dynasty had made his capital in 1598. The court chronicle of Iskandar Beg Munshi, the Tarikh-e Alam-ara-ye Abbasi, records the move of the capital and the royal building programme; the dynasty was a Twelver Shia monarchy, but the maydan is read here as a masterwork of Islamic architecture and Safavid urbanism. Isfahan under Abbas became one of the largest and most splendid cities of the age, celebrated in the saying that it was nisf-e jahan, half the world. The square was conceived as a single planned ensemble, roughly 160 metres wide and over 500 metres long, ringed by two storeys of arcaded shops and anchored by four monuments on its sides: the Ali Qapu palace gate with its high columned wooden verandah, or talar, on the west; the portal of the Qeysarieh royal bazaar on the north; and two mosques, the small jewel-like Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque on the east (1603-1619) and the vast congregational Masjid-e Shah on the south (begun 1611, its dome largely finished by the late 1620s and 1630s). The buildings were sheathed in brilliant glazed tilework, both cut tile mosaic and the faster seven-colour cuerda seca technique, in turquoise, cobalt and yellow, and the great Persian domes were raised as double shells on tall drums, a typology described in the surveys of Sheila Blair and Jonathan Bloom and of Robert Hillenbrand. The maydan was meant at once as a market, a parade ground and a polo field, with stone goal-posts set at its ends; European visitors to Abbas's court such as Pietro Della Valle and, a little later, Jean Chardin left admiring descriptions of the square and its life. Abbas drew Armenian merchants to the new suburb of New Julfa across the river to run the silk trade on which Safavid wealth rested. This scene shows the maydan in its formative building years: the arcades, the Ali Qapu and the bazaar portals are up, while a great tiled mosque rises behind timber scaffolding at one end and tile-cutters assemble panels of glazed revetment on the open ground, the square still a working site rather than the finished ceremonial plaza it would become.