Timur, Ulugh Beg, and the Samarkand golden age

Timur was born in 1336 near Shakhrisabz (Kesh), in what is now the Kashkadarya region of Uzbekistan. He was a Barlas Turk — a Turkicised Mongol tribe — and grew up as the leader of a warband. His nickname Timur-i Lang (Timur the Lame) came from a wound to his right leg and arm, still visible when his tomb was opened by Soviet archaeologists in 1941. By 1370 he had made himself the ruler of the Chagatai Khanate's western half, based at Samarkand.

Over the next 35 years he built an empire that reached from the Ganges to the Aegean. Between campaigns he ordered the movement of artisans, architects, scientists and scholars to Samarkand, so his capital would surpass every rival city he had defeated. The Gur-e-Amir (his mausoleum), the Bibi-Khanym mosque, Ak-Saray in Shakhrisabz, and much of Shah-i-Zinda are Timur's own commissions or contemporary work.

Timurid architecture is what you picture when you picture Uzbekistan: high pointed arches, ribbed turquoise domes, walls covered in geometric mosaics of majolica tile, and cursive Kufic inscriptions running around every portal. The style synthesises Persian (Ilkhanid), Anatolian (Seljuk), and older Central Asian traditions.

The four-iwan courtyard plan (a large open court framed by four monumental portals) becomes canonical. Domes gain double or triple shells so they can be much taller than earlier structures. The tilework technique of banna'i — using coloured bricks and glazed tiles together to write Kufic Arabic across whole walls — becomes signature.

Timur's grandson Ulugh Beg (1394–1449) inherited the governorship of Samarkand in 1409, at fifteen. Unlike his grandfather he was a scholar first and a ruler second. He built a madrasa on the Registan Square (1417–1420) whose curriculum included mathematics and astronomy alongside the traditional religious sciences, and where he lectured personally.

Between 1424 and 1429 he built his observatory on the Kuhak hill north-east of Samarkand: a three-storey circular building housing a giant sextant with a 40-metre arc. With a team of astronomers including Qadi Zada al-Rumi and Jamshid al-Kashi, Ulugh Beg produced the Zij-i-Sultani — a star catalogue of 1,018 stars accurate to about one minute of arc. It was the most precise astronomical data anywhere in the world until Tycho Brahe's late-16th-century Danish observations.

Ulugh Beg was murdered by his own son in 1449. The observatory was destroyed by religious zealots shortly afterwards; only its underground sextant survives, and can be visited today.

The Timurid Renaissance was not just architectural. Its greatest literary figure was Alisher Navoi (1441–1501), a courtier and poet who worked at the court of the Timurid Sultan Husayn Bayqara in Herat (now in Afghanistan). Persian was the prestige literary language of the entire Islamic east; most educated Central Asians wrote in Persian. Navoi's decision to write his greatest works in Chagatai Turkic — a decision he defended in prose — effectively founded a Turkic literary tradition.

His five long narrative poems (khamsa), his lyric divans, and his prose defence of the Turkic language established a canon that shaped every subsequent Turkic literature from Uzbek to Uyghur. He is still on the 500-som note.

Timurid Herat was also the centre of Persian miniature painting. The master Kamal ud-Din Behzad (c. 1450–1535) trained a generation of painters whose work — in the courts of Bukhara, Tabriz, and eventually Mughal India — set the standard for Islamic figural art for two hundred years. The tradition survives today in Uzbekistan: miniature workshops in Bukhara and Samarkand still teach it, and travellers who take a craft-focused tour will typically visit at least one.

Because most of what you actually look at is Timurid. The Registan — even though only its central madrasa (Sher-Dor) and right madrasa (Tilya-Kori) were built two centuries later — was framed and centred by the Ulugh Beg madrasa in 1417. The Bibi-Khanym mosque and Gur-e-Amir are Timur's own. Shah-i-Zinda's core mausoleums include Timurid additions. Ak-Saray at Shakhrisabz, half of Bukhara's oldest tilework, and Ulugh Beg's madrasa in Bukhara are all Timurid.

The scale of ambition matters too. Timurid buildings were built to make the viewer feel small — deliberately, and to a technical standard that hadn't existed before them and mostly didn't exist after. When Uzbeks talk about 'the golden age', this is the age they mean.