The essay begins with a brief introduction to the early Persianate institutions of learning whose buildings have since vanished, because they were erected using short-lived construction materials. However, a large number of Persianate manuscript paintings of the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries, which depict the practice of teaching in architectural settings, has survived. Is it possible to describe these places where the teachers and children gathered as they are presented in the illustrations? Were they mosques, madrasas, or private residences, or did the artists invent these architectural settings? The article explores twelve selected images, and proposes an explanation of these representations of the elementary schools (maktabs), including the construction methods, and the techniques of inner and outer decoration of these buildings.

The Architecture of the Elementary School in Persianate Painting of the Fifteenth to Sixteenth Centuries

The article focuses on the central plaza of the city of Samarqand, the seat of Transoxiana under the Sogdians and again under the Timurids. The earliest edifice on the Rigestān square is an early fifteenth-century madrasa named after the Timurid prince-scholar Ulugh Beg. Although the capital was transferred to Bukhara after the final conquest of Samarqand by the Uzbeks in 1500, the Shaibanids and their successors, the Ashtarkhanids, continued to embellish Samarqand with more imperial constructions. The Rigestān thus received its final form with two additional madrasas, the Shirdār and the Talākāri, by 1660. The article aims at describing and evaluating these structures and their architectural details, vis-a-vis the latest scholarship on art history.

Sulhiniso Rahmatullaeva

Papers

Samarqand’s Rigestān and its Architectural Meanings