The architecture of the khanate on the caravan roads khanates of Karbala as a model

The city of Karbala w distinguished by its ancient history and civilization, as it played an essential economic and commercial role in addition to its well-known cultural and religious place throughout different ages; this generated its need for many related functional buildings. As a result, markets and khanate have appeared, where they were geographically distributed between the center of the old city and between the external roads within the paths of merchants, travelers, and pilgrims, that were called khans of caravans. The historical evidence and literary references of the pre-Islamic period did not provide us with tangible evidence of the establishment of commercial facilities that served as khans in Karbala except in the Islamic era. The research will address the architecture of the external road khans or the so-called caravans’ khans in Karbala, which emerged in the Ottoman era, to clarify the specificity of architectural thought in forming studied design and planning elements with specific functions. Thus, there was a focus on the architectural characteristics and the formal relation of the formative thought of architecture of caravans’ khans. The problem was determined with the absence of a clear conception of the nature of the formative relations and the architectural elements that make up the buildings of caravans’ khans in Karbala. Therefore, the research aims to clarify the nature of the formative relations and the shape and type of the architectural elements that make up these buildings. The research concluded that the architecture of the caravans’ khans in Karbala represented a formative phenomenon, that shared the planning and urban aspects, where they were typical buildings based on the functional aspect (stations for travelers' rest). Most of caravans’ khans shared a formative pattern close to the quadrilateral and have same architectural elements (The Iowan, the courtyard, the hallway, the entrance and the main door, the domes, the arches, the fence, and the towers) as basic elements that distinguish this functional building and featured by a united style in terms of the formative thought. This indicates the presence of a unifying ideal for the architectural thought of buildings with specified functional characteristics.