Read Online A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time: The Story of the Taj Mahal by Michael Preston Diana Preston - Free Book Online Page A

the early sixteenth century described a now disappeared palace as called ‘“Astibisti” which in our tongue signifies eight parts as it has eight divisions’ . Architectural historians also point to the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, bathhouses in Damascus and palaces in Constantinople as conforming to this ground plan. They believe that the plan had its origins in pre-Islamic times, although to the Moghuls and their Muslim ancestors the octagon that resulted from the squaring of the circle had become a metaphor for the reconciliation of the material side of man, represented by the square, with the circle of eternity.
    Abul Fazl describes how Humayun employed an octagonal design in a floating palace on the Jumna. His builders joined four two-storey pavilions, each floating on a barge, by arches to form an octagonal central pool. (Humayun even had other barges planted with flowers and trees to provide a garden setting for his floating palace.) The earliest surviving examples of the use of octagonal design in Moghul India are two tombs built in Delhi, probably between 1530 and 1550. Because who is buried within them is now unknown, they are simply called the Sabz Burj, ‘Green Tower’, and Nila Gumbad, ‘Blue Dome’, from their original tiling. (The former is particularly important in the genealogy of the Taj Mahal and is disconcertingly now tiled in blue. It is also sited in the middle of a busy roundabout.) Both buildings have eight small chambers surrounding an octagonal central tomb area with a dome above. The eight chambers are said to represent the eight divisions of the Koran.
    Variations and developments of such octagonal designs – rather confusingly sometimes known as ‘the nine-fold plan’, from the number of chambers including the central chamber – are the basis for many Moghul buildings, including palaces as well as tombs, such as that of Humayun in Delhi constructed in the 1560s. For the Taj Mahal, the architects chose as their concept for the mausoleum a cube with its vertical corners chamfered to produce an octagon, with the cenotaph in a central octagonal space surrounded by eight inter-connecting spaces on each of two levels. For each of the eight exterior façades of the mausoleum the architects planned two storeys of arched recesses. On the four main sides, these recesses would flank massive entrance arches or iwans , similar to those on Humayun’s tomb, whose top border would rise higher than the rest of the façade.
    The Sabz Burj is also the earliest surviving Moghul building in India to incorporate the double dome used in Timur’s mausoleum in Samarkand, although the design, which originated in Persia, had been employed in the tomb of one of the Delhi sultans a few years earlier. In Humayun’s double-domed tomb, the half-grapefruit-shaped outer dome and its lower inner one sit on a relatively low drum. In the Taj Mahal, one of the architects’ greatest achievements was to produce an elegant double-dome design for the mausoleum. The inner dome, which rises eighty feet above the floor, is in harmony with the scale of the rest of the interior and produces a resonant echo. The swelling outer dome sits upon a high drum and is in perfect proportion to the remainder of the exterior of the complex. Shah Jahan’s chroniclers described the outer dome as ‘of heavenly rank’ when complete and as ‘shaped like a guava’ – a fruit only recently introduced into India from the New World. Others have likened it to a flower bulb, a ripe pear, a fig, a bead of liquid or even a woman’s breast.
    The architects surrounded the main dome with four domed kiosks. Although such chattris were used in Humayun’s tomb, there they seem too detached from the main dome. In the Taj Mahal, the architects placed them so that they cluster around the dome, seeming, from eye level, to be attached to it and softening the outline of the drum. Mindful of Shah Jahan’s love of jewellery, some have seen them as the