The shrine of Darb-e Imam ( fa, امامزاده درب امام), located in the Dardasht quarter of

Isfahan Isfahan ( fa, اصفهان, Esfahân ), from its Achaemenid empire, ancient designation ''Aspadana'' and, later, ''Spahan'' in Sassanian Empire, middle Persian, rendered in English as ''Ispahan'', is a major city in the Greater Isfahan Regio ...

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 The Qara Qoyunlu or Kara Koyunlu ( az, Qaraqoyunlular , fa, قره قویونلو), also known as the Black Sheep Turkomans, were a culturally Persianate, Muslim Turkoman "Kara Koyunlu, also spelled Qara Qoyunlu, Turkish Karakoyunlular, Eng ...

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 he ...

have studied

Islam Islam (; ar, ۘالِإسلَام, , ) is an Abrahamic religions, Abrahamic Monotheism#Islam, monotheistic religion centred primarily around the Quran, a religious text considered by Muslims to be the direct word of God in Islam, God (or ...

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.

References

External links

Islamic tiles reveal sophisticated maths

Image of tiles
Ziyarat Islamic architecture Tessellation {{Islam-stub

The girih tiles

See also

References

External links