Pir-e Alamdar Tower

Pir-e Alamdar is a round brick tomb tower in the old town of Damghan, a few steps from the city’s Friday mosque. A band of brick inscription in Kufic script near the top dates it to the year 417 of the Islamic calendar, 1026–27 CE, making it one of the oldest dated tomb towers in Iran. It belongs to the same family of monuments as the great tower of Gonbad-e Qabus, built about two decades earlier in the neighbouring province of Golestan.

According to the inscription, the tower was built by a man named Bakhtiyar as a tomb for his father, the governor Abu Ja’far Muhammad ibn Ibrahim. Readings of the inscription differ in some details, but all agree on the date. The name by which the tower is known today, “Pir-e Alamdar”, the “old standard-bearer”, comes from later local tradition.

The tower is a simple cylinder of fired brick under a dome, its surface enlivened by bricks set to form patterns, and its top encircled by the inscription in raised Kufic letters. Inside, remains of wall painting have been found, a rare survival from the eleventh century. Small as it is, it shows the moment when Iranian builders were learning to give monumental form to tombs, an experiment that would lead to the tall tomb towers of the Seljuk and Ilkhanid periods.

Together with the Tarikhaneh mosque and the Jameh mosque of Damghan, Pir-e Alamdar makes this small desert city a remarkable place to see the early centuries of Islamic architecture in Iran.