Place · Qutb Shahi necropolis
Qutb Shāhi Tombs, Ibrahim Bagh
Also known as Ibrahim Bagh, Qutb Shahi Tombs, Qutb Shahi Tombs, Hyderabad, Qutub Shahi Tombs, Seven Tombs
A walled necropolis of some thirty tombs of the Qutb Shahi sultans and their families between the Golconda fort and the Charminar city, built in a Deccani idiom of bulbous domes on arcaded square chambers with stucco minarets at the corners and pierced-stone jalis. Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah, who founded Hyderabad in 1591, is here, and so is his heir Sultan Muhammad; the whole dynasty from Sultan Quli to Abdullah is interred within the one compound. A long conservation project with the Aga Khan Trust for Culture ran through the 2010s.
- Function
- Burial and funerary
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 17.395, 78.396
Worth knowing
It is the only Indian dynastic necropolis where an entire line lies together in one garden, seven sultans across a hundred and seventy years. The dancers Taramati and Premamati of the court are said to be buried among them, which is an unusual honour and the kind of story a dynasty remembered for its Dakhni poetry attracts.
Connections (2)
- Site adjacencyChārmīnār
The Charminar stands at the centre of the city Muhammad Quli founded on the Musi in 1591, and the dynasty's tombs are five kilometres away in a garden below the fort they had left. Between them they are the two halves of the Qutb Shahi project: a court moving out of a citadel into an open commercial capital, and a necropolis built in the shadow of the citadel it had abandoned, each sultan raising his own tomb while he lived.
- Site withinHyderabad
The Qutb Shahi Tombs are the dynastic necropolis of the Hyderabad founders, in a walled garden on the hill between Golconda and the walled city. Every ruler of the dynasty that laid out Hyderabad in 1591 is buried here — Muhammad Quli, who built the Charminar, among them — so the royal cemetery and the royal city are one landscape at two ends of a two-kilometre road.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Qutb Shahi tombs”. UNESCO World Heritage Centre Tentative List submission.
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