Ali Shojaee Esfahani
Abstract
As a part of urban planning and during the construction of the underground railroad of Charbagh Street, an excavation was carried out from February to May 2015 to detect the location of Jahan Nama Palace, which was destroyed in 1935. The excavation resulted in a better understanding of the Safavid governmental ...
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As a part of urban planning and during the construction of the underground railroad of Charbagh Street, an excavation was carried out from February to May 2015 to detect the location of Jahan Nama Palace, which was destroyed in 1935. The excavation resulted in a better understanding of the Safavid governmental house, Dowlatkhana, and Charbagh Street itself. The discovered materials belong to the pre-Islamic, pre-Safavid, Safavid, and post-Safavid periods. This article studies the architecture and artifacts, which were discovered during this excavation, of Jahan Nama Palace. Although the excavation had the usual limitations, such as time, resources, and space, it provides us with a comprehensive picture of the palace, the governmental house, and Charbagh Street. In a larger view, the results also help us locate other destroyed structures of the city more accurately. The pre-Safavid findings, which at the time were out of the city walls, represent details, which were previously unknown to us, of the suburbs of Isfahan in the middle ages. The discovery of the remains of Jahan Nama Palace, together with the maps and descriptions provided by historians and travelers, provides a framework for the planning of future investigations and the identification of related features of the city in pre- and post-Islamic era. These results demonstrate the importance of such investigations for our understanding of the historical cities of Iran. The discovery of pre-Safavid structures and pre-Islamic materials also underlines the importance of this part of the Isfahan Plain during earlier periods.
Ali Shojaee Esfahani
Abstract
On the outskirts of the old fortification of Isfahan, the Chahār-bāgh avenue was built during the expansion of the city in the reign of Šāh ʻAbbās I. At the starting point of Chahār-bāgh, the Jahān-namā palace was built by his command as well, which was the entrance monument of the Dowlat-xāneh. ...
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On the outskirts of the old fortification of Isfahan, the Chahār-bāgh avenue was built during the expansion of the city in the reign of Šāh ʻAbbās I. At the starting point of Chahār-bāgh, the Jahān-namā palace was built by his command as well, which was the entrance monument of the Dowlat-xāneh. Chahār-bāgh and Jahān-namā, like many other monuments of Isfahan, were destroyed after Safavids' collapse, particularly during the reign of Ẓel al-Solṭān, the Qajar governor of Isfahan. In some travel books of European travelers in Safavid era, and the textual and visual sources of Qajar, this district of Isfahan is mentioned and illustrated. The remaining visual sources of Safavid and Qajar era, and the documents of Dowlat-xāneh district in Pahlavi period, give us keys to find the location of the palace, and shed light on some of the architectural aspects of the complex that cannot be deciphered from textual sources. The present article is an attempt to a concurrent analysis of textual and visual sources. The extracted data helped in the development of the archaeological project of the Jahān-namā palace, and the northern and southern parts of the palace, which belong to the periods before Safavids, and after them.
