Construction of the Bibi-Khanym Mosque in Samarkand

Date

c. 1399-1404

Category

Culture, arts & philosophy

Region

Samarkand, Transoxiana (modern Uzbekistan), Central Asia

Era

Post-Classical / Medieval

Significance

Commissioned during the reign of Timur (Tamerlane) and associated with his senior wife Saray Mulk Khanum, the Bibi-Khanym Mosque was built between roughly 1399 and 1404 to be the great congregational mosque of his imperial capital, Samarkand.

Conceived after Timur's campaign in India, it drew on artisans, masons, and materials gathered from across the conquered lands, with chroniclers describing the use of elephants to haul stone, and it stood among the largest and most ambitious mosques in the Islamic world. The complex followed the classic four-iwan plan around a vast rectangular courtyard, crowned by a towering double-shell dome and a monumental entrance portal flanked by minarets. Its scale strained contemporary engineering, and parts of the structure began to crack and decay soon after completion, a process accelerated by later neglect and by an earthquake in 1897. Celebrated as a landmark of the Timurid Renaissance, it shaped monumental architecture across Central Asia, Iran, and Afghanistan, and was extensively reconstructed in the Soviet era. Today it forms part of the Samarkand UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Empires active in c. 1399-1404

• Malacca Sultanate
  1400 CE – 1511 CE
• Ming Dynasty
  1368 CE – 1644 CE
• Kanem-Bornu Empire
  700 CE – 1900 CE
• Ottoman Empire
  1299 CE – 1922 CE
• Solomonic dynasty
  1270 CE – 1974 CE
• Byzantine Empire
  330 CE – 1453 CE

Related culture, arts & philosophy events

• The High Renaissance in Italy: Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael
  c. 1490–1530
• Kan'ami and Zeami refine Noh theatre under shogunal patronage
  1374
• The Djinguereber Mosque founds monumental Timbuktu
  1327 CE
• Timbuktu emerges as a centre of Islamic learning
  c. 1325
• Zhu Xi completes the Neo-Confucian synthesis and the Four Books
  c. 1175-1190
• Thomas Aquinas and the height of scholasticism
  1265–1274 (Summa Theologica)

Further reading

The Story of Art

The wider story

The Story of Art

E. H. Gombrich

The best-selling art history ever written, from cave paintings to the modern age.

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