The shrine of Darb-e Imam ( fa, امامزاده درب امام), located in the
Dardasht quarter of
Isfahan,
Iran
Iran, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran, and also called Persia, is a country located in Western Asia. It is bordered by Iraq and Turkey to the west, by Azerbaijan and Armenia to the northwest, by the Caspian Sea and Turkmeni ...
, is a funerary complex, with a cemetery, shrine structures, and courtyards belonging to different construction periods and styles. The first structures were built by
Jalal al-Din Safarshah Jalal (Arabic: جلال) is a masculine given or family name. The name or word Jalal means majesty and is used to honor and venerate.
When the Arabic language spread across non-Arabic regions, Jalal has also become a name for some Arabic-speaking C ...
, during the
Qara Qoyunlu reign in 1453.
The girih tiles
Peter Lu
Peter James Lu, PhD (陸述義) is a post-doctoral research fellow in the Department of Physics and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has been recognized
for his discoveries of ...
and
Paul Steinhardt
Paul Joseph Steinhardt (born December 25, 1952) is an American theoretical physicist whose principal research is in cosmology and condensed matter physics. He is currently the Albert Einstein Professor in Science at Princeton University, where ...
have studied
Islamic
tiling
Tiling may refer to:
*The physical act of laying tiles
* Tessellations
Computing
*The compiler optimization of loop tiling
*Tiled rendering, the process of subdividing an image by regular grid
*Tiling window manager
People
*Heinrich Sylvester T ...
patterns, called ''
girih tiles
''Girih'' tiles are a set of five tiles that were used in the creation of Islamic geometric patterns using strapwork ('' girih'') for decoration of buildings in Islamic architecture. They have been used since about the year 1200 and their arrang ...
''. They strongly resemble
Penrose tiling
A Penrose tiling is an example of an aperiodic tiling. Here, a ''tiling'' is a covering of the plane by non-overlapping polygons or other shapes, and ''aperiodic'' means that shifting any tiling with these shapes by any finite distance, without ...
s, to which the designs on the Darb-e Imam shrine are almost identical.
See also
*
Azulejo
''Azulejo'' (, ; from the Arabic ''al- zillīj'', ) is a form of Spanish and Portuguese painted tin-glazed ceramic tilework. ''Azulejos'' are found on the interior and exterior of churches, palaces, ordinary houses, schools, and nowadays, r ...
References
*
External links
Islamic tiles reveal sophisticated mathsImage of tiles
Ziyarat
Islamic architecture
Tessellation
{{Islam-stub