It was during the final stages of my doctoral research at the University of Edinburgh, examining the development of Rum Seljuq architecture, that I came across an image of the original section of brick strapwork decoration on the façade of the tomb of Nasr ibn ‘Ali in Uzgend. I subsequently received funding from the university to travel to Kyrgyzstan in order to study the surviving Qarakhanid monuments in Uzgend, Safid Buland and Balasaghun. From this trip grew a project to reassess the surviving corpus of buildings and examine the increasing volume of archaeological material from the region. The award of a three-year post-doctoral research fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust allowed me to conduct this project in full. The aims of this book are to present the individual monuments in close detail, and to integrate the study of Qarakhanid architecture into the architectural and cultural context of the wider region of Central Asia and eastern Iran in the period from the late tenth to the early thirteenth centuries.

This interdisciplinary volume uses a range of methodologies, but in essence the overall approach taken is to return to first principles, and the primary aim is to provide as detailed a study as possible of all of the surviving monuments in the corpus. Whilst all the buildings covered have been published somewhere over the last century and a half, for the most part they are quite poorly documented and the material is widely dispersed throughout the huge body of scholarship produced during the Soviet period. Much of the work is admirable, if hard to find, but in many cases it is hidebound by the nationalist methodologies enforced by the authorities from the 1920s onwards. This nationalist paradigm has only intensified since the establishment of the post-Soviet republics in the region. One aspect of this study is to move away from the anachronistic nationalist approach to monuments that were built under the aegis of a decentralised dynasty whose territory now falls within the boundaries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and China.