Mqbrh Kwhrshad Bykm

The Tomb of Gawhar Shad Begum is the burial place of one of the most powerful and culturally significant women in the history of the eastern Islamic world. Gawhar Shad (c. 1378-1457) was the principal wife of the Timurid sultan Shah Rukh — the son of Timur (Tamerlane) and the ruler of the Timurid empire from 1405 to 1447 — and the effective co-ruler of the empire during her husband's long reign. She was a major patron of architecture, religious endowments and the literary, artistic and musical culture of the Timurid renaissance, and is responsible for some of the greatest religious buildings of the eastern Islamic world: the magnificent Goharshad Mosque attached to the Imam Reza shrine in Mashhad (which still bears her name), the lost Goharshad madrasa-mosque complex of Herat (whose tile-covered minarets are still visible as ruined fragments), and numerous other endowments across Khorasan. Gawhar Shad was killed in 1457 by her great-grandson Sultan Abu Said in a brutal Timurid succession dispute when she was approximately seventy-nine years old, and was buried in the funerary complex she had built for herself attached to her Herat madrasa. The tomb chamber, with its blue-tile dome on a high octagonal drum and its restrained but elegant interior, is one of the most architecturally distinguished surviving Timurid funerary buildings and remains a quiet site of remembrance in modern Herat.