The Impact of Ganjali Khan Endowments on Urban Structure of Kerman, with Emphasis on Endowment Documents of Ganjali Khan

Obviously, social history and its impact on urban structure should not be neglected in studies on history of architecture, and urban planning; but unfortunately because of weakness in historical sources, we do not have specific information on our social history and as a result it is neglected. Also we rarely can find noticeable information on urban development, which indicates stability, security, governmental plans, and economical improvement of society; and our information mostly depends on buildings and constructions of different historical periods. Endowment documents are drawn up to formalize the act of endowing, but there are hidden points in these documents which throw light on some historical obscurities. Even though noticing documents and specially endowment documents has had an impressive increase in present decade, but mostly has been used in historical studies and neglected in other domains, such as Urban planning. Observation of endowment documents would provide precious information on circumstances of structural development of cities. In the present paper we have tried to elucidate structural developments of Kerman in Safavid era by means of study and context analysis of existing endowment documents of Ganjali Khan (Kerman’s sovereign in the reign of Shah Abbas I). As a result the study has been done by reading out and analyzing the contexts of these documents and other sources have been used just by necessity. The main question is how endowment has helped structural development of cities; and the hypothesis suggests that insight of the benefactor and his knowledge of social requirements can organize his endowments with regard to structural development of the city.