برج پیر علمدار

Damghan, the old capital of the province of Qumis, seems to have reached its peak in the first half of the 11th century under Abu Harb Bakhtiyar, a Ziyarid general and patron of the poet Manuchehri¹. In 417-18 AH (1026-27), under the Ziyarid ruler Manuchehr, Abu Harb succeeded his father, the hajib (army commander) Abu Ja'far Muhammad ibn Ibrahim, as governor of Damghan¹. Manuchehr, a son of Qabus, builder of the Gonbad-e Qabus, had come to the throne in 1012^1,5. Abu Harb raised this tower for his father, and its Kufic band names both men^1,2. In 1027-28 he built the Tarikhana mosque's minaret, which Iranica counts as Iran's earliest datable minaret¹.

Abu Harb later took the title amir al-umara and tied himself directly to the Abbasid caliph al-Qa'im, but he lost power soon after the Ghaznavid defeat at Dandanqan in 1040¹. Under the Seljuks the Daylamite chief Asfar ibn Kurduya, Toghril's governor of Damghan, built a second tower in 446 AH (1054-55): the Chehel Dokhtaran, raised for one Pir-e Esfahan, whom Adle takes to have been a respected Sufi guide¹. In the early 14th century the Damghani master Haji ibn Husayn ibn Abi Talib, who also worked on the Bayazid complex at Bastam, added a small mosque to Pir-e Alamdar; Iranica described it as ruined in 1993¹. Josephine Powell photographed the tower before and during its restoration^2,5.

The tower is a simple brick cylinder about 13 m high and 6.4 m across, entered from the south-west^2,5. A low hemispherical dome covers it, which Archnet notes sets it apart from contemporary tombs, most of which had conical roofs; it also lacks the crypt common in later towers such as those at Maragheh². The ornament is gathered near the top of the shaft in nine bands: two wide bands of maze-like geometric brickwork frame a band of Kufic inscription that names Abu Harb and the man buried inside². Narrow bands of varied brick patterns separate them, and a sawtooth band leads up to a three-tier corbelled cornice; the dome is set back from the cornice edge and is visible only from a distance².

The rectangular doorway sits in a framed niche under a semi-vault and a pointed arch, between two columns². Kufic writing runs in the semi-vault, with chequer and chain patterns above it and diamond patterns on the archivolt and spandrels, all worked in brick and stucco². O'Kane cites the tower, with the Chehel Dokhtaran, as an example of the inventive decorative brickwork on the shafts of the earliest tomb towers, whose domes were still plain³. Blair cites the builder's signature on the tower, dated 417 AH (1026-27), as an example of craftsmen signing their work in Arabic in this period⁴.

Inside is a single round chamber, plastered throughout and without a crypt². A wide band of highly stylised Kufic script runs round the wall just below the dome and quotes verses from Surat al-Zumar (Qur'an 39)².