Munajjim Yazdi, Shah Abbas’ astrologer royal, accompanied the Shah along the 1601 walk and produced day-to-day records, itemising the stopping places and recording the distances between them using a tanab – a rope measuring 39.9m.
I found Yazdi’s tanab measurements extremely useful when I was searching for Abbas’ stopping places, and was keen to investigate how easy it was to use a rope in practice.
In what is surely the first ever comparison of measurement with rope and satellite-sourced GPS, the tanab came out as very accurate, and easy to use whilst walking at normal speed – no halts are required, unlike for GPS.
Once I knew I could rely on the tanab-distances between halts, I used a mix of current local knowledge and data from Google Earth to identify the Shah’s stopping places. Western travellers’ accounts from Shah Abbas’ Iran then provided near- contemporary descriptions for many of the stopping places.