Afghanistan’s buildings reflect a land at the crossroads of Central Asia, Iran and India, shaped as much by climate and local materials as by the dynasties that ruled it. In much of the countryside, homes are still built from earth: walls of pakhsa (packed cob) or sun-dried mud brick, finished with mud plaster and often grouped around a shared courtyard inside a high compound wall.
In the Herat region many houses are roofed with the gunbad, a domed vault of mud brick that masons raise course by course, sometimes leaving an opening at the top to let hot air escape. Thick walls and earthen roofs help keep the rooms comfortable, and the same earthen craft can be seen on a grand scale in Herat’s old citadel.
Alongside this everyday tradition stand great monuments: the Buddhist cave monasteries cut into the cliffs of Bamiyan, the 65-metre brick Minaret of Jam raised by the Ghurids in the 12th century, and the Timurid mosques and shrines of Herat, whose domes and portals are clad in glazed tile. Major monuments such as Herat’s Friday Mosque even kept their own workshops to make and repair their tiles.