Mausoleum van Avicenna

Avicenna (Ibn Sina) was born at Afshana near Bukhara, in about 980 or, as Dimitri Gutas thinks, some years earlier^6,11. From 1015 he lived in Hamadan, treating the Buyid ruler Shams al-Dawla and serving as his vizier until the amir died in 1021; about 1024 he moved to Isfahan to serve the Kakuyid Ala al-Dawla^6,11. He died of colic in 1037 on one of Ala al-Dawla’s journeys to Hamadan and was buried there^6,11. His grave lay in a large, plain rectangular building in a courtyard visited mostly by dervishes, repaired in 1877 by a Qajar princess, Negar Khanom¹. The site had been the house of his friend and host Abu Sa’id Dokhduk, buried beside him^1,7.

In 1944 the Society for National Heritage (Anjoman-e Asar-e Melli) was revived to build a new tomb for the millenary of Avicenna’s birth, which fell in 1370 AH (1951)⁴. Houshang Seyhoun, trained at Tehran University under André Godard and Maxime Siroux, completed his design in Paris in 1949 as his graduation project⁵. The old building was pulled down and replaced in 1951; Archnet and Talinn Grigor date the new tomb to 1952, and Mohammad Reza Shah inaugurated it on 29 April 1954^1,2,3. Grigor describes the Society’s pattern in such projects: the remains were exhumed and examined, a modern building rose on the site, and the remains were reburied at a royal inauguration³.

Archnet calls the tower a modern interpretation of Ziyarid tomb towers such as Gonbad-e Qabus, and Mozaffari and Westbrook say the design cites that tower explicitly^2,5. Gonbad-e Qabus, already in this atlas, has ten flanges; Seyhoun gave his tower twelve piers instead, which Iran’s official tourism portal links to twelve sciences Avicenna mastered^7,8. The piers meet under a conical cap: the building is a little over 28 m high to the tip, the tower rising 23 m above the roof of the tomb⁷. On the east, the entrance portico has ten round columns of monolithic granite, 4.10 m high, one for each century since Avicenna’s birth⁷. The Society’s last emblem showed this tower³.

Visit Iran presents the design as a blend of pre-Islamic and Islamic Iranian architecture: gardens on the Persian model, a fountain inspired by the howz-khaneh, the pool room of traditional houses, and a facade of large, rough-hewn granite from Mount Alvand meant to recall ancient palaces⁷. The complex covers about 3,090 m², of which about 1,792 m² is built, with a museum in the south wing and a library in the north^8,9. A white marble statue of Avicenna by Abolhassan Sadighi stands on the east side of the square, and the poet Aref Qazvini is buried in the courtyard^1,2,7.

From the eastern portico a wooden door leads into the entrance hall⁷. On either side lie two gravestones: on the right Avicenna’s old stone, and on the other side that of his host Abu Sa’id Dokhduk⁷. A single marble slab, inscribed in thuluth script by the calligrapher Ahmad Ma’sumi Zanjani, covers both graves⁷. Along the upper walls, Avicenna’s philosophical ode known as the ’Ayniyya runs over forty marble panels in thuluth⁷. Halls to either side hold the library and the museum, where coins, pottery and bronzes found in the region are shown with a photograph of Avicenna’s skull, probably taken when the old building was pulled down^7,8,9. On the upper level, at the centre of the tower, stands a square cenotaph with an Arabic inscription in raised thuluth on its four sides⁷.