Stone Inscription of Khalilabad Polo Square, A Document of the Masterpieces of the Safavid Era

Among one of the old cemeteries of Aligudarz city, there were four pieces of cylindrical milestone with mushroom-shaped heads as standing gravestones, which were exposed to the attention of profiteers of historical monuments in 2010. After excavating and destroying one of the graves with precedence from 1980's, one of the stones was broken in the middle for profit and the two others were overturned, and only one stone remained in the collection, which also had inscriptions in Persian including four lines of poetry with a date of 1694.Ten years later (spring of 2020), the cultural heritage associations received news of the intention to destroy the fourth milestone in Lorestan's cultural heritage. Accompanied by the police and the protection unit, the inscribed stone was transferred to the Aligudarz Anthropological Museum. This research has been accomplished by exploratory and combined quantitative-qualitative method and analysed in a descriptive- appraisal frame. Based on anthropological information, archeological findings, architectural documents and historical texts, field research revealed that the stone pillars belong to the gates of polo Square, which was built during the Safavid period by Khalil Khan, ruler of Bakhtiari, and his grandson Yahya Khan, along with a mansion and a city named Khalilabad. Findings made turned out that after the destruction of this city, mansion and polo square, all four stone pillars transferred to a nearby cemetery and as a sign or standing stone, placed on the graves of four great men and head men. The inscription of  polo square milestone that is discovered from Aligudarz is taken into account as the first case of this type discovered in Iran; So it could make an entrance to further studies on this issue.