Guru Hargobind Sahib Ji succeeded in 1606, immediately after Guru Arjan Dev Ji died in Mughal custody at Lahore.
He took two swords at his succession, miri and piri, temporal authority and spiritual authority, and had the Akal Takht built facing the Harmandir Sahib. The Harmandir sits low, reached by descending steps. The Akal Takht faces it and stands higher than the Mughal throne at Delhi was permitted to be by anyone else.
The arrangement is the doctrinal turn that produced everything else on this map: an armed community with its own seat of authority, which is how a religious movement becomes a state within a century and a half.
There are five takhts. The Akal Takht at Amritsar is the first among them. Keshgarh Sahib at Anandpur, Damdama Sahib at Talwandi Sabo, Patna Sahib and Hazur Sahib at Nanded are the others, two of them outside Punjab.
It is a takht, a throne, and not a shrine. Business was done at it. The gurmata was passed in front of it, disputes were heard there, and the sangat sat in assembly on the ground before it. The building is a platform with a room built over it and the function is the platform.
The two swords are worn together and the doctrine is that neither is complete alone. Sikh institutional history since has largely been an argument about how the two relate.
The building was destroyed in 1762, damaged in 1984, rebuilt by kar seva, taken down again and rebuilt by the SGPC. What stands is a modern building on an old site.
There is a document in the Panjab Digital Library that traces the history of the Akal Takht as an institution rather than as a building. It follows the establishment by Guru Hargobind Sahib Ji and then the changing significance of the Takht across different periods of Sikh and Punjab history, placing it within the wider relationship between spiritual authority, temporal responsibility and collective Sikh affairs.
Its value is not only as a history of a significant Sikh institution. It is useful for understanding how the Akal Takht came to carry meaning beyond the physical structure itself, becoming a continuing site of authority, memory and community identity. The building has been destroyed and rebuilt more than once. What the document follows is the thing that survived each rebuilding.
The Akal Takht: Its Historic Role, Panjab Digital Library.