Baysunghur and Ulugh Beg were sons of Shah Rukh and Gawhar Shad, grandsons of the conqueror Timur, and two of the central figures of the Timurid Golden Age in fifteenth-century Herat and Samarkand. Baysunghur governed Herat and was himself a trained calligrapher. Ulugh Beg governed Samarkand and was a working astronomer, not just a patron of one.
This episode follows both men's signature projects. In Herat, Baysunghur commissioned a new copy of Firdawsi's Shahnama, the Book of Kings, in 1426. A workshop of twenty-five craftsmen, calligraphers, painters, decorators, bookbinders and pattern-makers, some of them artists brought back from a captured Tabriz, spent four years producing a manuscript of 346 leaves and 21 paintings, the text copied by a calligrapher named Ja'far. In Samarkand, Ulugh Beg built an observatory around an enormous stone arc and, with roughly sixty scholars, measured the length of the year to within a minute of the true value, a result more accurate than tables built from Copernicus's work more than a century later.
Both men died before their time. Baysunghur at thirty-six, from apparent poor health. Ulugh Beg was overthrown and killed by his own son, Abd al-Latif, in 1449. The episode traces how a family capable of real internal brutality also produced, in the same generation, a manuscript still held in Tehran's Golestan Palace and a star catalogue that was printed in Oxford three separate times between 1665 and 1843, long after the empire that funded it had disappeared.
Sources for this episode include the historical record as verified against Archives' own fact-checked daily content on the Timurid Golden Age, covering the reigns of Shah Rukh, Gawhar Shad, Baysunghur and Ulugh Beg.
This is part 2 of a 4-part series on the Timurid Golden Age.
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