The Great Mosque of Samarra was, in its time, the largest mosque in the
largest city in the world. The spiral minaret built alongside this mosque was
an indicator of the wealth and power of the caliphate, as well as an indicator of
the presence of Islam in the city. Since the minaret was built it has become
the mascot for the city of Samarra, and research has shown that the engineering
behind this structure, and a similar spiral tower built by the same caliph to
the north, is truly impressive.
I was originally under the impression that the Malwiya tower (malwiya
means ‘spiral’), as it is often called, was the first structure of its kind,
preceded by nothing comparable. In my research I found that this is not
necessarily the case. While the structure is visually striking and unique in
many ways the tower is not without its predecessors, or early prototypes. It was
Wikipedia, the free encyclodpedia, that pointed me toward the minaret’s past.
Beneath the photograph of the Malwiya tower there was a caption that mentioned
a tower of a fire temple in Firuzabad, Iran. The caption called the tower an
ancient predecessor to the spiral minarets.
Being wary of the free encyclopedia, since every teacher or professor I
have ever spoken with regards Wikipedia as an unreliable source, I tried to
find more information on this fire temple tower. Thankfully, Dr. Anderson
pointed me to Encyclopedia Iranica. This database gave me information on the
circular city of Firuzabad, the ruins of which are still somewhat intact, and
the tower that stands in the city’s center, which can be called the Goor or Gur
tower. Gur was the name of the city of Firuzabad hundreds of years before
Islam. The tower that stands in the middle cannot be confirmed as being part of
any particular temple, as no evidence exists to indicate that a temple stood in
the city center and the reports of such a tower are confused with reports of
another tower and temple that lay outside the city walls (Huff 1999). I am very
interested in comparing these two structures for similarities and differences
to try to derive what the two would have meant to the people who were a part of
the structure’s context.
Whether or not the tower stood near a temple is of little consequence
outside comparing whatever religious function the tower may have served for the
temple with the function of the spiral minarets. This is because one: we do not
know if the tower was even associated with a temple, or what kind of temple it
may have been, or what the practice of worship meant there, and two: the spiral
minarets in Samarra could not have actually served their functions as towers
for the muezzin to call the community to prayer from. No mention of a special
structure reserved for the muezzin’s purpose is ever mentioned in the Qu’ran
(Gottheil 1910).
From the top of the Gur tower one would be able to look out to the city’s
perimeter to observe activity in the city. The tower may also have served as an
aid for astronomical studies. Clearly the tower was significant, hence its
placement in the very center of the city. We can assume that the tower provided
some practical use. The tower was also confirmed to have a form of four steppes which receded. Ernst Herzfeld confirmed during excavation that the tower would have had an external staircase (Northedge 1991). So physically and visually we have some similarities between the two types of structure.
The spiral minarets, on the other hand, can hardly have the same said
about them. By looking at photographs taken from the height of the towers we
can see that, though they may be the largest structures in Samarra, they would
not serve as lookout towers in a city so big. The muezzin’s voice could not
possibly carry to the community from the top of one of those minarets. What’s
left, in the way of use, is the use for studying astronomy. We can be sure
someone was studying astronomy in the largest and richest city in the world,
built by an empire that cared enough about math and science to preserve and
develop the technology necessary to build such structures, although the
accounts of the caliph in power at the time emphasize al-Mutawakkil’s lack of
dedication to the pursuit of knowledge. These accounts effectively paint the caliph as a buffoon who enjoyed parties and feasts and building large expensive monuments. The reported expenses of the caliph are upwards of 243,000,000 dirhams, and the spiral minarets itself costed 15,000,000 dirhams (Robinson 2001).
Reconstruction
To recreate the minaret I began by extruding the faces of two squares to
create the base. The height of the two squares once extruded is approximately
ten meters high. The surface area of the top square is large enough to fit a
circle with a diameter of thirty three meters.
Once the circle was drawn I drew
another circle from the center point of the first circle. This second circle is
much smaller in diameter, which is approximately five meters. From this circle
I drew a spiral. I created the spiral using the arch tool. I counted the number
of segments on each side of the center point of the circle to ensure that the
spiral gave about five or six rows on either side.
Once the spiral was drawn I drew
a line to bisect the large circle. Then I did it again. I continued to bisect
the circle until there were lines more or less evenly placed around the circles
surface. I then erased the lines drawn within the smaller circle in the center
to simplify the next step, which was to extrude the center circle to a height
of fifty two meters.
The Sketchup application is not
very intuitive when it comes to measurements. Each time you finish drawing a
line or extruding a face the measurement in the bottom right corner resets to
zero. This makes measuring while you draw imperative, meaning that once any
line is drawn I would have to use reference shapes in order to re-measure. This
is what I had to do after realizing that somehow I made the minaret twice as
tall as it needed to be. This explains the one extruded step for most of my
visuals. It was raised to be certainly fifty two meters high in order to give
reference to the resizing of the rest of the figure.
I erected
this minaret one step at a time. I extruded one step of the minaret at a time.
This was the best solution I could think of to creating this figure. While
raising the faces a few thoughts occurred to me. One was the precarious nature
of this staircase. I want to know the history of the specific structure,
because I’m sure that people living in Samarra during its construction were
amazed at this architectural feat, this visual anomaly, the aesthetics of which
no one could have been familiar with. How many teenagers snuck out to climb the
minaret in the middle of the night, and would they have been in trouble for it?
Who was allowed to climb this tower? Who was required to climb this tower?
This minaret is taller than any other structure in Samarra at the time of
its construction; it truly is state of the art. Perhaps we could liken it to
the empire state building once it was first built? How different was the
process of erecting that monument from my own process raising it in Sketchup? A
most intriguing thought: what did the people of Samarra think of the tower? Was it ugly to them? A nuisance? Were they proud of it? Since the accounts we have are from the caliphate, a biased perspective, we will probably never know.
Bibliography
Gottheil, R. J. (1910). The Origin and History
of the Minaret.Journal of the American Oriental Society, 30 (2),
132–154.
, et al. "Islamic art." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford
University Press, accessed May 28, 2013, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T041771pg7.
Northedge, Alastair. The Historical Topography of
Samarra. London: British School of Archaeology
in Iraq ;, 2005.
Robinson, Chase F. A Medieval Islamic City
Reconsidered : an Interdisciplinary Approach to Samarra. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Ruggles, D. Islamic
Art and Visual Culture : An Anthology of Sources. Malden, MA: Wiley- Blackwell, 2011.
Northedge, A. (1991).
Creswell Herzfeld and Samarra.Muqarnas, 8, 74–93.
*all photos here are either screenshots or were found using Google image search
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