Taq Kasra (Arch of Ctesiphon)
Interesting facts
- Roald Dahl photographed the arch in 1940 while flying solo in a Hawker Hart biplane during RAF training; the picture won him a bronze medal in Cairo.
- Dahl's photograph of the arch was later sold at auction by his family for £6,000 to support the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre.
- The vault thins dramatically with height: its walls are up to 7 metres thick at the base, while the crown of the arch is only about a metre thick.
- The arch follows a catenary curve, the shape of a hanging chain turned upside down, and was raised without any wooden centring.
- In Persian the monument is called Ayvan-e Kesra, the iwan of Khosrow, after the Sasanian king Khosrow I traditionally linked with it.
- It is the only structure still visible above ground of Ctesiphon, the main capital of the Parthian and Sasanian empires for about nine centuries.
- When the French architect Pascal Coste studied the arch with the artist Eugène Flandin in 1851, he judged that the Romans had built nothing comparable.
- The arch appeared on an Iraqi postage stamp of 1923, and the facade of the National Museum of Iran in Tehran borrows its design.
- In 2017 the Netherlands-based filmmaker Pejman Akbarzadeh released the first full-length documentary devoted to the monument, Taq Kasra: Wonder of Architecture.
Why it is worth it
Taq Kasra, the great arch of Ctesiphon, is the last standing hall of the Sasanian kings of Persia and one of the boldest feats of brick building from the ancient world. Its vault rises about 37 metres, spans some 26 metres and runs around 50 metres deep, and it was built of unreinforced brick without any wooden centring to hold it up during construction. The courses were laid leaning back at roughly 18 degrees from the vertical so that each new ring could rest partly on the rear wall and on the bricks already set, bound with quick-setting mortar. It is counted as the second-largest single-span vault of unreinforced brickwork in the world, after the Gavmishan Bridge in Iran.
The arch opened onto a throne room about 24 by 48 metres and more than 30 metres high. Who built it remains debated: some historians credit Shapur I in the 3rd century, others Khosrow I after his campaign against Byzantium in 540, and medieval writers named at least four different Sasanian rulers as its builder. Ctesiphon itself, on the eastern bank of the Tigris, grew from a Parthian military camp founded around 120 BC into an imperial capital, merging with Hellenistic Seleucia across the river into a metropolis of about 30 square kilometres. Roman armies took it repeatedly, under Trajan in 116, Avidius Cassius in 164 and Septimius Severus in 197; under the Sasanians, from 226, it was greatly enlarged.
Arab forces captured Ctesiphon in 637, and the hall was used for a time as a mosque before the city faded after the founding of Baghdad in the 760s. The ruin kept its hold on the imagination: the 9th-century poet al-Buhturi wrote a celebrated ode on it, the Persian poet Khaqani visited in the 12th century, and the Abbasid caliph al-Muktafi had bricks taken from the palace for his own Taj Palace in Baghdad. A severe flood in 1888 brought down much of the building.
Getting there
The arch stands beside the town of Salman Pak, in the ancient district known as al-Mada'in, about 35 km southeast of central Baghdad; the town of Al-Mahmudiyah is about 20 km away. Baghdad International Airport (BGW) is about 37 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Tāq Kasrā, also transcribed as Taq-i Kisra or Taq-e Kesra or Ayvān-e Kesrā are the remains of a Sasanian-era Persian monument, dated to c. the 3rd to 6th centuries, which is sometimes called the Arch of Ctesiphon. It is located near the modern town of Salman Pak, Iraq. It was the facade of the main palace in Ctesiphon, and is the only visible remaining structure of the ancient capital city. The archway is considered a landmark in the history of architecture, and is the second largest single-span vault of unreinforced brickwork in the world after the Gavmishan Bridge in Iran.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
33.09372, 44.58072per Wikidata