The great Multan tomb raised about 715

بناء الضريح الكبير للملتان نحو ٧١٥هـ

c. 1315 CE · 715 AH

Multan

About 715/1315 the great tomb at Multan was raised, said to have been built by Ghiyath al-Din Tughluq for himself and later devoted to Shah Rukn-i Alam by Firuz Shah; its lower storey is octagonal rather than square, with tapered round buttresses at the angles, the brickwork relieved by carving, shisham-wood string courses and panels set with turquoise ceramics — the mature form of Multan's three-zone tomb under a hemispherical dome 1.

Depth

At a glance

Era
The Crusades, Ayyubids and Mamluks
Region
South Asia

In time

1300131013201330 c.
The Crusades, Ayyubids and Mamluks · The Mongol and Post-Mongol Era

In space

Multan

Map: Natural Earth, public domain · places and route from the graph

Overview

About 715/1315 the great tomb at Multan was raised, said to have been built by Ghiyath al-Din Tughluq for himself and later devoted to Shah Rukn-i Alam by Firuz Shah 1.

The form

The tomb differs from the city's other mausolea in that its lower storey is octagonal rather than square, with tapered round buttresses at the angles crowned by small domes around the main one; inside, sixteen concentric arches in recessed planes form squinches and clerestory windows and carry a thirty-two-sided cornice 1.

A Multan school

It is the mature form of a Multan school of brick architecture in three zones — a battered-walled base, a tall octagonal drum with an opening on each face, and a hemispherical dome — sheathed outside with turquoise and white ceramic panels alone 1.

Connections

Explore the connections

Occurred at
Multan
During the reign of
al-Mustakfi I

People and things also explored

Al-Dhahabi composes Tarikh al-Islam and his great compilations, c. 730/1330· Al-Dhahabi, professor of hadith at Umm al-Salih and al-Nafisiyya, c. 710/1310· Shaykh of the Ashrafiyya and Nuriyya hadith schools, Damascus, 17 Rabi' I 740· Al-Subki teaches at the Mansuriyya, Cairo, 723/1323· Al-Subki becomes chief qadi of Damascus, 739/1339· Al-Subki's journey to Damascus and the Pilgrimage, c. 710/1310· Shaykh of Dar al-Hadith al-Zahiriyya, Cairo, Shawwal 723· The Arghuns take Multan into the Mughal orbit, 1526

Sources

  1. Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition (Leiden: Brill, 1954–2008), 13 volumes , vol. 7 p. 604
Cite this page

islam.museum contributors. “The great Multan tomb raised about 715”. islam.museum, https://islam.museum/en/event/shah-rukn-alam-tomb-715/. CC BY-SA 4.0. Last updated 2026-11-09.

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Related

Al-Dhahabi composes Tarikh al-Islam and his great compilations, c. 730/1330

Al-Dhahabi composed his greatest work, Tarikh al-Islam, down to the year 700 on the model of Ibn al-Jawzi's al-Muntazam, in seventy decadal 'classes', pairing each year's events with the obituaries of its dead. He abridged it six times — among them Siyar A'lam al-Nubala', Tadhkirat al-Huffaz, al-Ibar and Duwal al-Islam — and wrote on rijal Mizan al-I'tidal, al-Mushtabih, besides extracting his great, small and select Mu'jam of his hadith teachers.