Tūn

Tun was one of the chief towns of Quhistan in southern Khorasan, standing among settlements sustained by irrigation at the edge of the desert. Its Friday Mosque preserves an early thirteenth-century plan with two iwans, a sign of the town's longstanding importance. Together with Qaen, Tun gave the surrounding region a name encountered by travellers as Tunocain. In the early eighteenth century, the Sistani leader Malek Mahmud governed Tun and Tabas under the Safavids. As royal authority weakened, he extended his power in Khorasan and occupied Mashhad in 1723. The fortunes of Tun were thus bound to the struggles that accompanied the collapse of Safavid rule in the east.