The foundation document survives, dated August 1307, and it reveals a remarkably detailed plan. The endowment totaled nearly 50,000 dinars. Two professors led the academic program -- the senior one earning 500 dinars annually, his assistant 200. Ten salaried students received 30 dinars over a five-year course of study. A hospital operated with a head doctor earning 330 dinars and a surgeon at 100. There was a special area for Sufi devotions, staffed by a shaikh and five other Sufis. Twenty-four Quran reciters chanted at the tomb around the clock. One hundred of the poor were fed daily. The complex sat atop a hill, entered through a grand portal flanked by minarets, opening onto a courtyard with four iwans.

The complex included a workshop dedicated to producing books -- an operation that was part scriptorium, part factory, part art studio. Here, early manuscripts of the Jami' al-tawarikh, Rashid al-Din's comprehensive history of the world from China to Europe, were created. In the 1330s, the workshop probably produced the Great Mongol Shahnameh, one of the most celebrated illustrated manuscripts in Islamic art. The combination of scholarship and book production made Rab'-e Rashidi unique in the medieval world. It was not merely a school; it was a center where knowledge was both studied and physically manufactured for distribution.

Rashid al-Din's execution in 1318 came from what historians believe was a political conspiracy. He was falsely accused of poisoning Oljeitu Khan. The charges destroyed his reputation, and his foundation was plundered. His son Muhammed Ghiyath tried to revive the complex, expanding it after his father's death, but he too was killed in 1336, and the institution was looted again. Later rumors compounded the disgrace: during the reign of Miran Shah in the early 1400s, claims circulated that Rashid al-Din had been Jewish. His remains were exhumed from the tomb he had prepared at Rab'-e Rashidi and moved to a Jewish cemetery. The building complex that surrounded the residential quarter had grown to include shops, baths, caravanserais, and thirty thousand houses. All of it declined.

Shah Abbas chose the site for a fort centuries later, including the governor's palace. By the end of the 17th century, those buildings too were in ruins. Today, most of Rab'-e Rashidi lies underground. What survives above the surface are masonry bases of fortifications -- it is unclear whether they date from the 14th century or from Shah Abbas's later construction. One rectangular projection may be the foundation of an astronomical observatory mentioned in Rashid al-Din's writings. Mosaic fragments found on the site span from his era to the Safavid period. Archaeologists continue to excavate, peeling back the layers of a complex that was, for a brief and extraordinary moment, one of the great intellectual centers of the world.