Rey

Rey lies at the southern foot of the Alborz, where the road from the western plateau meets the Khorasan highway, and it is one of the oldest cities of Iran. The Rhages of the ancients grew into a great Islamic metropolis and the Buyid capital of the tenth century. Sasanian remains and brick tomb towers recall that past, and the shrine of Shah Abd al-Azim, a descendant of the Prophet's family, kept pilgrims coming long after the markets declined.

The Mongols devastated Rey in the thirteenth century, and it never recovered its place. Around 1340 a geographer named nearby Varamin, not Rey, as the chief town of the district, while the village of Tehran, just to the north, was growing among its gardens. Rey lived on as a pilgrimage town, with the shrine enlarged under the Safavids and later dynasties. In 1618 the Italian traveller Pietro Della Valle found large gardens but little sign of a living town. Tehran, walled in the sixteenth century and made the capital by Agha Mohammad Khan in the 1780s, took over Rey's role on the plain.