Nishapur
city in Razavi Khorasan Province, Iran
Nishapur (Persian: نیشاپور) or Neyshabur (نیشابور, [ˌnejʃɒːˈbuːɹ] ) is a city in the Central District of Nishapur County, Razavi Khorasan province, Iran, serving as capital of both the county and the district.
Nishapur is the second most populous city of the province in the northeast of Iran, situated in a fertile plain at the foot of Binalud Mountain Range. It has been the historic capital of the Western Quarter of Khorasan, the historic capital of the 9th-century Tahirid dynasty, the initial capital of the 11th-century Seljuk Empire, and is currently the capital city of Nishapur County and a historic Silk Road city of cultural and economic importance in Iran and the Khorasan region.
Nearby are turquoise mines that have supplied the world with turquoise of the finest and the highest quality for at least two millennia.
The city was founded in the 3rd century by Shapur I as a capital city of Sasanian satrapy known as Abarshahr or Nishapur. The city later became the capital of Tahirid dynasty and was reformed by Abdullah Tahir in 830, and later selected as the capital of Seljuk dynasty by Tughril in 1037. Nishapur had a territory of 17.6 hectares and 25,000 people in the 6th century, while by the year 1000, the population of the city was about 336,000 people with the territory of 1,680 hectares. From the Abbasid era to the Mongol invasion of Khwarezmia and Eastern Iran, the city evolved into a significant cultural, commercial, and intellectual center within the Islamic world. Nishapur, along with Merv, Herat and Balkh, was one of the four great cities of Khorasan and one of the greatest cities of the Old World in the Islamic Golden Age with strategic importance, a seat of governmental power in the eastern section of caliphates, a dwelling place for diverse ethnic and religious groups and a trading stop on commercial routes from Transoxiana, China, Iraq and Egypt.
Nishapur reached the height of its prosperity under the Samanids in the 10th century but was destroyed and most of its population was slaughtered by the Mongols in 1221.
The public source identifies “Nishapur” as city in Razavi Khorasan Province, Iran. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Nishapur, city and Razavi.
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Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q131350. VIAF identifies the subject as 136057278. The Library of Congress control number is n81144037. Authority coordinates are 36.213, 58.796. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1037, 1000 and 1221.
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This entry incorporates text from “Nishapur” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.