288 RUINED TUS, THE HOME OF THE POET FIRDAUSI
conjecture on this point be allowed, I would suggest that this edifice in the heart of the ruined city commemorates Hamid ibn Kahtabah, the son of the first of the Abbasid Dynasty, in the eighth century, since Yakut (1216) mentions a structure having his name as one of the noteworthy buildings of Tus, and Daulat- shah (1487) certainly refers to it as the 'Abbasid Mausoleum* (^Mazdr '-AhhdssiaK)^ when he speaks of Firdausi's grave being located near by.^ If this be correct, it must be admitted that the existing structure must have been erected to replace an older building, for it could hardly be supposed to date back to the eighth century, for the reasons explained above.
The interior of the shrine was in as poor a condition as its exterior, though traces of the building's former dignity were perceptible. The moulded brickwork in the roof of the cupola, some seventy feet above the ground, showed the honeycomb design, which might easily be matched in the shrine of Sanjar at Merv. Beneath the dome the main chamber itself opened, on the eastern side, into a vaulted niche that evidently formed the sepulchral chapel, while the other sides presented nothing more than empty arches.
On the dusty floor of the mausoleum lay two fragments of heavy gravestones, which seemed at first to form parts of a single block, rudely broken across, but which later I judged to be portions of two different cenotaphs, considering the size of
1 The reference in Yakut is trans- posed to have been a black slave, a
lated by Barbier de Meynard, Diet. friend and companion of our Saviour ' ;
geog. p. 396, as 'la maison d'Hamid the other report, to the effect that it
ben Qahtabah ' ; for the allusion by contained the bones of the martyred
Daulatshah, see Browne, Tadhkirat, ' Shah Zadeh Mahrook,' is certainly to
or Memoirs of Dawlatshdh, p. 54, be rejected in the light of what has
London, 1901, and Lit. Hist. Persia, been said above, p. 242, regarding the
2. 138, n. 4 ; on the early Abbasids, Imam of that name. A suggestion
see Skrine and Ross, Heart of Asia, might be made to call it the tomb of
pp. 83-85. Regarding the mausoleum, Harun ar-Rashid, were it not for the
Fraser, p. 518, says that he could find fact that Harun's burial-place was by
no satisfactory account of it, though the side of Imam Riza at what is
one of the two reports he heard as- now Mashad, as told in the preceding
signed it to ' Boork-e-Asswud,' 'sup- chapter.
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