The chahar bagh is the classic Persian garden form, a rectangular enclosure quartered by two intersecting water channels into four planted beds, with origins traced to ancient Persia and the gardens attributed to Cyrus the Great at Pasargadae around the 6th century BCE. The cross of water expressed the four rivers of paradise, and the layout combined irrigation, shade and cooling with a clear cosmological geometry. The form was carried across the Islamic world to Mughal India, where it shaped settings such as the Taj Mahal.
It brought a designed, symbolic landscape into the heart of the city and the palace as a model of ordered paradise on earth. As a portable template it influenced garden and urban design across Persia, the Islamic world and Mughal India for two millennia.