Like the Qizilbash, his own Sadozai dynasty were Persian-speaking and culturally Persianised and Timur Shah looked to his Timurid predecessors—“the Oriental Medici” as Robert Byron dubbed them—for his cultural models. He prided himself on being a man of taste, and revived the formal gardens of the Bala Hisar fort in Kabul first constructed by Shah Jahan’s Governor of Kabul, Ali Mardan Khan.
