999 caravanserais?

Everyone knows 999 caravanserais were constructed by Shah Abbas the First . . don’t they?

Certainly, very many Iranians will – on the slightest provocation – tell one of the very many variants of the story: most commonly that the Shah thought that the number 999 was so precise that it should be believed, whilst 1000 might be thought to be an exaggeration.

So I was really (really!) surprised, when retracing the Shah’s 1601 walk to Mashhad, to find not a single caravanserai definitely dated as Abbasi along one of the major trans-Iranian highways (the route crossing Khurasan: often called the Iranian Silk Road – click here for a map). The table below shows the dates known for caravanserais at Shah Abbas’ 1601 stopping places along here – and all of them are from the later Safavid reigns (of Shah Abbas the Second or Shah Soleiman).

These dated buildings were unlikely to be rebuilds of Abbasi constructions: significant repairs, requiring the investment implied by an inscription tablet, are more usually recorded as taking place centuries rather than decades after the initial erection of a caravanserai.

Of course, I’m not saying there were no Abbasi caravanserais anywhere in Iran – a previous posting, for example, includes details of one in Yezdikhwast. And there’s lots of technical caveats (any inscriptions can be, and are, stolen; and repairs complicate any stylistic dating of mud and mudbrick buildings, especially when such buildings are anyway often constructed anew rather than being repaired).

But it does seem very strange that I could find no details of definitely Abbasi caravanserais along this major route; especially when the (very) recent Uzbek-Safavid campaigns in the area had destroyed so many buildings – leaving commercial buildings in need of (re)construction – and when the 1601 walk was such a propaganda success, itself apparently leading to a substantial increase in pilgrim-traffic to Mashhad, and to significant (re)construction of caravanserais.

I can’t (yet) claim to definitely know the reason for this strange finding. But I wonder if maybe it’s related to the Safavid-Uzbek conflict?

Traffic of people and goods is unlikely to have stopped altogether during the campaigns.  So, perhaps, the caravanserais in Khurasan in 1601 were simply more fortified, more ribat-like, than those constructed later.  If they had some military function; they would necessarily have been kept in reasonable condition and perhaps would not have needed to be rebuilt immediately afterwards.  Then, in the more peaceful later decades, buildings to house travellers had less need to be defensive forts, and could be constructed as more specifically trade-centred caravanserais.

To fit with this idea, the Table below shows that lots of the caravanserais along the way have also been called ‘forts’ – even if they are constructed purely for peace.