the Tien Shan region, Turfan, and the northeastern section of the Tarim Basin. The Turkic Uighurs especially favoured portraiture. In the 7th and 8th centuries Uighur artists already had acquired great proficiency in rendering likenesses in a style heavily influenced by Chinese portraiture of the T'ang period. These portraits were painted on silk and were frequently inscribed with the sitter's name.Khitans (Khitan)The figural style is believed to have been transmitted to the Mongols by the Khitans when the latter were living on the middle reaches of the Yenisey. The wealth of the Khitan princes is reflected in the furnishings of burial mounds discovered at Kopeni, some 200 miles (300 kilometres) to the south of Krasnoyarsk. Dating from the 7th to 8th century, these mounds were similar in type to those constructed by the nomads of the 1st millennium BC. One of the richest graves contained four gold jugs set on a silver dish and a number of gold, silver, and bronze ornaments (State Hermitage Museum). Two of the jugs, although undecorated, carry Orhon inscriptions on their bases. Two others are covered with delicate relief representations of birds and fish surrounded by flowers and vegetation, executed in a style influenced by Islāmic art. A Scytho-Altaic hunting motif of riders pursuing a tiger, a deer, and a panther appears on a bronze ornamental object.Turkic tribes had been concentrating their numbers in Central Asia from about the 5th century AD. In the 6th century the Kul Tepe and Bilge Khan tribes established a state of their own in the Orhon valley. The inscriptions that they carved on the valley's rocks are of considerable historical importance. In the 7th century the Turkic Oğuz people were so numerous that they constituted 24 tribes. The Sāmānids, Ghaznavids, Ghūrids, and Seljuqs were of Oğuz extraction.Sāmānids (Sāmānid Dynasty)The Sāmānids centred their kingdom in Khorāsān. In the 9th century, under the leadership of Esmāʿīl (Ismāʿīl I ibn Aḥmad), they ruled over Transoxania and eastern Persia from their capital of Bukhara. Esmāʿīl's türbe, or mausoleum, the oldest Islāmic monument surviving in Bukhara, reproduces the form of the Zoroastrian (Zoroastrianism) chanar taq, or fire temple. In Sāmānid and Seljuqid hands, the türbe generally took the form of a small circular or octagonal building, roofed with a turret shaped like the point of a pencil. Mounted on a solid or single-vaulted substructure, its single chamber had a domed ceiling and a mihrab, or niche indicating the direction of Mecca. In the more elaborate türbes, the single door was framed with bands of geometric decoration, and the turret was sometimes ribbed.Ghaznavids and GhūridsAlp Tigin, a slave of Turkic origin at the Sāmānid court, escaped in AD 962 to Kābul, where he rapidly gained control of the town. He transferred his headquarters to Ghazna (Ghaznī) in central Afghanistan and established his dynasty there. Few Ghaznavid (Ghaznavid Dynasty) works of art have survived, but the admirably proportioned and decorated mortuary (tomb) towers at Ghazna are architectural achievements of great splendour. Still finer is the minaret of Jām, a Ghūrid (Ghūrid Sultanate) structure of the 11th century. Standing alone in a desolate region, it escaped discovery until 1957. It is conjectured that the minaret may mark the position of the lost Ghūrid capital of Fīİūzkūh.Seljuqs (Seljuq)The art of the Seljuqs, who founded kingdoms in Persia, eastern Byzantium, Syria, and Iraq, eclipsed that of the Sāmānids, Ghūrids, and Ghaznavids. They were great architectural patrons and constructed numerous mosques, madrasahs (Islāmic religious schools), hospitals, orphanages, baths, caravansaries, bridges, and türbes notable for their decorative masonry, elaborately ornamented portals, and use of Kūfic script as an architectural decorative device. The Seljuqs also attained a high standard in their decorative arts, especially metalwork, wood carving, and pottery. The Mongols, who terminated the Seljuq period, adopted certain Seljuqid artistic conventions, particularly the use of