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Ghaznavid burial of 1030; present building 19th–20th century

Tomb of Mahmud of Ghazni

آرامگاه سلطان محمود غزنوی

The garden tomb of the sultan to whom Ferdowsi presented the Shahnameh

The tomb of Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni lies in a walled garden at Rawza, a village just outside the city of Ghazni in eastern Afghanistan. Mahmud, who reigned from 998 to 1030, made Ghazni the capital of an empire that reached from western Iran to the Punjab. A Turkic ruler with a Persian-speaking court, he gathered poets and scholars around him, among them the polymath al-Biruni, and it was to Mahmud that Ferdowsi presented the Shahnameh, the Persian Book of Kings. Later tradition tells that the poet, disappointed by the sultan's reward, gave it away, and wrote verses against him.

Mahmud was buried in 1030 in a garden that his contemporaries knew as a garden of victory. The building that now covers the grave is much later, dating from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but inside lies a marble cenotaph carved with an Arabic inscription in Kufic script naming the sultan, the work of Ghaznavid craftsmen.

The tomb once had great carved wooden doors. In 1842, during the First Anglo-Afghan War, British forces carried them off to India, announcing that they were the gates of the Hindu temple of Somnath, which Mahmud had sacked in 1026. Scholars later showed that the doors were Islamic work with no connection to Somnath. They are now kept in the Agra Fort. Rawza remains a place of visits and prayers, and the garden around the tomb has been restored in recent years.

Tomb of Mahmud of Ghazni through time

Iranian history
  1. Elam and the first cities4000 BCE
  2. The Medes850 BCE
  3. The Achaemenids550 BCE
  4. Seleucids and Parthians330 BCE
  5. The Sasanians224
  6. The Arab conquest and the Persian revival636
  7. Seljuks, Mongols and Ilkhanids1040
  8. The Timurids1370
  9. The Safavids1501
  10. Afsharids, Zands and Qajars1736
  11. The Pahlavi century and after1925

636–1040

The Arab conquest and the Persian revivalفتح اعراب و احیای زبان فارسی

Islam reached Iran with the Arab armies of the 7th century. Persian survived, took on a new script and, under dynasties such as the Samanids, returned as one of the great literary languages of the world.

  • 1030 Death and burial of Mahmud of Ghazni
  • 1842 British forces remove the tomb's wooden doors to India

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