The takhts were not established together as a single system but accumulated one at a time, each tied to a specific event in the lives of the Sikh Gurus. Guru Hargobind founded the first, the Akal Takht at Amritsar, in 1609, building it facing the Golden Temple to embody his doctrine of miri and piri, temporal and spiritual authority held together rather than kept apart, and giving the Sikh community a seat of worldly authority alongside its seat of devotional life for the first time. The remaining four takhts followed over the century after, each marking a place where a Guru, most often the tenth, Guru Gobind Singh, took a decisive action: at Anandpur, where the Khalsa was founded in 1699; at Patna, his birthplace; at Damdama, associated with a recension of the scripture; and at Nanded, where he died in 1708. Once the line of living Gurus ended with Guru Gobind Singh's declaration that the scripture itself would be Guru thereafter, the five takhts became the standing mechanism by which the Panth could still receive an authoritative edict, a hukamnama, issued jointly or by the senior Akal Takht, without any single living person holding the Gurus' personal authority again.
Since the 1920s the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee has administered the Akal Takht and the other major gurdwaras, so that a modern elected body now stands behind the seat the Gurus themselves built, translating the takhts' historic authority into a working institution for a community with no single living leader.