Architectural inscriptions at the Imam Reza Shrine organize relations among the Imam, pilgrim, patron, and shrine while transmitting religious texts and building history. This study asks whether differences between selected Safavid and Qajar inscriptions can be demonstrated as changes in relational rules rather than merely as increases or decreases in themes. It adopts a qualitative, historical-comparative, case-based design and a limited archaeological use of Foucault’s discourse framework. The purposive corpus comprises ten inscriptional units—four Safavid and six Qajar—from the Enghelab and Azadi courtyards. Each unit was segmented into semantic parts and examined for statement type, mode of address, relations among statements, enunciative authority, subject positions, and architectural placement; textual stability and the condition of the material surface were assessed separately. In the four Safavid units, sacred or transmitted authority leads to love, supplication, or pilgrimage and then to aid, forgiveness, or intercession, while the patron remains outside the principal semantic chain. Two Qajar units continue Qur’anic and pilgrimage-oriented patterns. In four patron-oriented–commemorative units, however, royal command, endowment, administrative agency, building work, and date are integrated into the shrine’s sacred frame through syntactic, causal/instrumental, or spatial relations. Reconfiguration is not a property of all Qajar inscriptions, but a pattern confined to this cluster. The Imam remains the sacred center; the patron becomes a visible servant; the pilgrim is a devotional addressee and proposed witness to building memory; and the shrine is both pilgrimage site and historical institution. The conclusions remain limited to this non-representative corpus.