This late Timurid agricultural manual from Herat devotes a chapter to the layout of the chahar bagh and its pavilion, giving the fourfold Persian garden its most explicit written specification. It sets out a rectangular walled enclosure raised on a platform, quartered by cross-axial water channels, with prescribed dimensions in cubits for canals, the central pool and its distance from the pavilion, and named plantings for each quarter. The garden is treated simultaneously as productive horticulture and as an image of the Quranic paradise of four rivers. What had been transmitted by practice from Pasargadae and Timur's Samarkand gardens became a repeatable geometric module.
The chahar bagh scaled up from garden to urban device: it structured Safavid Isfahan's Chahar Bagh avenue and the Mughal tomb-garden and riverfront city, making axial water and quartered geometry the ordering instrument of whole capitals. It remains the canonical demonstration that hydraulic engineering, cosmology and formal composition can be one and the same planning act.
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