Taj Mahal
The Panipat War laid the foundation of the Mughal Empire in Agra. The loss of the Governor of Afghanistan, Sikandar Lodhi, was a turning point in the history of national architecture. This Mughal royal city, known worldwide as the city of Taj Mahal, has many other monuments emphasizing the high point of Mughal architecture.
The founder of the Mughal dynasty, Babur, set up the first official Persian garden on the banks of the Yamuna River. Akbar erected the great walls of the great Red Fort and within its walls Jahangir built red palaces, courts and gardens.
However, the glory of the city is clearly the Taj, a monument of thought that has become a "symbol of eternal love" .The Taj represents India in a world adorned by Shah Jahan with marble masks, palaces and marble gemstones.
In 1631 AD, Shah Jahan, Emperor during the Mughal Empire of great prosperity, felt grief when his third wife, Mumtaz Mahal, died during the birth of their fourteenth child, Gauhar Ara Begum. ShahJahan's court documents show the love story held as an encouragement to the Taj Mahal.
The Taj Mahal incorporates and expands on the architectural traditions of Persian architecture and early Mughal architecture. Direct inspiration came from the successful Timurid and Mughal structures that included; Gur-e Amir (tomb of Timur, ancestor of the Mughal dynasty, Samarkand), Tomb of Humayun and Jama Masjid of Shah Jahan in Delhi.
While earlier the Mughal buildings were made of red marble, Shah Jahan encouraged the use of white marble adorned with preciou stones and the buildings below him reached new levels of refinement.
The tomb of Itmad-Ud-Daulah (sometimes called Baby Taj), which Nur Jahan built for his father, Mirza Ghiyas Beg was the first Mughal monument to be built entirely of marble. This special monument depicts the transition from red stone buildings to those of white marble and is believed to be the precursor to the magnificent Taj Mahal. However, the architects are transforming the art model into a nearby model that was completed about 60 years earlier, at Humayun's Tomb in Delhi, by his wife, Hamida Begum.
According to Koch, who spent ten years digging right into the famous monument and measuring every inch of the great complexion, this is exactly what the emperor with the architect's idea wanted to do: a monument unparalleled in beauty and grandeur for generations to come. "It will be," according to his court historian Muhammad Amin Qazwini, "a work of art in the years to come, which will amaze everyone."
"As a historian I had little doubt about love," admits Koch. But his story, Padshahnama, written by a series of carefully chosen historians, goes into extraordinary details about the heart of a broken emperor, including how his beard turned white overnight and how he shared his begum not only with love but also with psychological meeting.
Shah Jahan began building his “best art in the years to come”, said Koc, with great thought. The mere selection of a site, for example, took him about six months. The fashion trend of the royal capital Agra was that the front river was turned into a garden cemetery. But the Taj would not be one of the many garden cemeteries. "Shah Jahan knew and nothing made the image stronger than just size, so he decided to build a building that was almost a mile long," Koch said. "It's a big deal when it's not in the world, at least in Asia."
Twenty thousand people have been sent to work on it. The equipment was imported from all over India and central Asia and took a network of 1000 elephants to the area. According to court historian Abdul Hamid Lahori, a series of wells were placed along the river and filled with rocks and other solid materials to lay a solid foundation for this large mausoleum. The great architect of the Taj was a Persian named Ustad Isha Khan (a well-known architect of his time) who was assisted by other architects to make the Taj Mahal a deep mixture of Persian, Turkish, Indian and Muslim architecture.
To make it an excellent piece of architecture, 28 gemstones and gemstones were used to decorate with their beautiful combination. However, the most widely used decoration was the famous white marble found in Makrana (Rajasthan).
Some gemstones have been imported from as far away as India, Ceylon and Afghanistan; Jasper from Punjab, jade and crystal from China, Turquoise from Tibet, lapis lazuli and sapphire from Arabia and Panna diamond. Red sandstone colors of various colors form the basis for the quarries of neighboring Sikri, Dholpur etc.
By the end of the 19th century, parts of the building had become badly damaged. During the Indian Revolution of 1857, the Taj Mahal was denounced by British soldiers and government officials, who engraved precious stones and lapis lazuli on its walls.
At the end of the 19th century, British King Lord Curzon ordered a major restoration project, completed in 1908. He also installed a large lamp in the inner room, which was followed by a mosque in Cairo. During this time the garden was remodeled with British grass that still stands today.
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