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Empire In-The-Round: The Tiered Stages Of Naqsh-I Jahan Square In Isfahan, Sean P. Silvia

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

Naqsh-i Jahan Square lies at the heart of the Safavid Empire's capital city of Isfahan, and it is a remarkable unified artistic statement that renders legible Shah 'Abbas' imperial ideology in the urban landscape. It is also a complex made up of many different buildings with theater iconography: the caravanserai, coffeehouse, maydan, and palace. Though there is much existing scholarship analyzing these buildings separately, this paper proposes a new holistic conception of these stage spaces as linked and hierarchal. The stages embody the Shah's goal of centralization by facilitating ease of movement to promote urban consolidation and they invite the …