Timurid Renaissance: Samarkand, Herat and What Remains
The Timurid Renaissance ran from Ulugh Beg's star tables to Bihzad and Navoi in Herat and ended in 1507. Here's what of it you can still see in Uzbekistan.
On 27 October 1449, a few miles outside Samarkand, Ulugh Beg was beheaded on the orders of his eldest son. He'd been allowed to leave on pilgrimage, a polite word for exile, and didn't get far. Within months the observatory on Kuhak hill had lost its patron and its astronomers had started drifting away. It's tempting to treat that death as the end of the Timurid Renaissance. It wasn't. It was the moment the centre of gravity moved south, from Samarkand to Herat, and the second half of the story, the half with the paintings and the poetry, happened in a city that's now in Afghanistan.
That matters if you're travelling in Uzbekistan, because it explains an odd gap in what you see. Samarkand shows you the first half of the fifteenth century in brick and tile. The second half is mostly in Herat, Cairo, Istanbul and Tehran.
What "Timurid Renaissance" means, and what it doesn't
The label is modern, borrowed from Europe, and a bit loose. It describes roughly a century, from Timur's death in February 1405 to the fall of Herat in 1507, when his descendants lost most of their battles and kept paying for manuscripts, madrasahs and observatories anyway. The conqueror himself belongs to the prologue. He assembled the craftsmen, often by deporting them, and our profile of Timur and his campaigns covers that side. What his sons and grandsons did with the machinery is the renaissance proper.
Two things set it apart. First, it was bilingual. Persian was the language of the court, the chronicles and most of the poetry, but by the end of the century a Turkic literary language, Chagatai, had its own classics. Second, it was split between two capitals that were rarely run by the same person for long. Think of it as a relay: Samarkand carried the baton to about 1449, Herat ran the last leg.
Samarkand's leg: a governor who measured things
After the succession wars that followed Timur's death, his youngest son Shah Rukh came out on top and ruled from Herat. In 1409 he gave Samarkand and Transoxiana to his teenage son Ulugh Beg, who governed there for about forty years.
Ulugh Beg spent it on buildings that taught and instruments that counted. His madrasahs went up in Bukhara (1417), Samarkand (1417–1420, the oldest building on the Registan) and Gijduvan (1430s). The observatory's star catalogue, the Zij-i Sultani, logged 1,018 stars, and its measurements of the year and of the Earth's axial tilt were the best available until Tycho Brahe. We've told the science in detail in our piece on Ulugh Beg as an astronomer, so we won't repeat the numbers here.
What's worth adding is how narrow the base was. The Samarkand school depended on one patron's salary budget. Jamshid al-Kashi died around 1429, Qadi Zada al-Rumi about a decade later, and when Ulugh Beg fell in 1449 there was no institution to outlive him. Samarkand's scientific moment lasted about a generation.
Herat under Shah Rukh: the other capital
While his son counted stars, Shah Rukh (ruled 1405–1447) made Herat the empire's administrative and religious centre. His wife Gawhar Shad was a builder on a scale that few women of any court matched, commissioning the great mosque in Mashhad and a mosque-and-madrasah complex in Herat whose surviving minarets still stand, badly damaged, on the city's northern edge.
Their son Baysunghur (died 1433) ran the royal library-workshop, the kitabkhana, where calligraphers, illuminators, painters and binders worked on a single book together. The best-known product is the Baysunghur Shahnameh of 1430, now in the Golestan Palace in Tehran. That workshop model, a studio rather than a lone artist, is the thread that runs straight to Bihzad two generations later.
The years between 1449 and 1469 were messy. Abd al-Latif, Ulugh Beg's killer, was himself murdered within about six months. Abu Said, a great-grandson of Timur, took Samarkand in 1451 and later Herat, and ruled both until he was captured and killed on campaign in 1469. His reign left Samarkand some of its least-visited Timurid buildings, which we come back to below.
The last court: Husayn Bayqara, Navoi and Jami
Sultan Husayn Bayqara took Herat in 1469 and held it until his death in 1506. Politically he was a survivor, ruling essentially Khorasan while his own sons rebelled more than once. Culturally, his thirty-seven years were the peak.
The central figure wasn't the sultan. It was his childhood friend Alisher Navoi, born in Herat on 9 February 1441, who served him as a senior official and spent a fortune of his own on madrasahs, a hospital, baths and caravanserais in and around the city. Navoi wrote in Persian too, under the pen name Fani, but his lasting work is in Chagatai Turkic. His Khamsa, five long narrative poems answering the Persian quintets of Nizami, proved that a Turkic language could carry the most prestigious forms Persian had. In December 1499 he finished Muhakamat al-lughatayn, "The Judgement of Two Languages", which argues outright that Turkic is the richer of the two.
Next to him stood Abd al-Rahman Jami (1414–1492), the last great classical Persian poet and a Naqshbandi Sufi, whom Navoi treated as a teacher. Babur, who visited Herat as a young exile in 1506, later wrote admiringly of the scholars, poets and artists he found there.
Why care about a poet buried in Herat? Because Uzbekistan treats Navoi as the founder of its literature. His name is on Tashkent's opera house, a metro station, a city, a national park and a province, and that claim rests on the Chagatai poems.
Bihzad and the painted page
Kamal al-Din Bihzad (c. 1450–c. 1535) is the painter the whole period is remembered by. By the late 1480s he was the leading painter in the royal kitabkhana in Herat, working under the master Mirak Naqqash. His most secure surviving work is a set of paintings in a copy of Sa'di's Bustan made for the sultan's library, with a colophon dated 1488, now in the Egyptian National Library in Cairo. The Encyclopaedia Iranica entry on Bihzad is the careful place to start if you want to know which attributions are solid and which are wishful.
What changed with him? Earlier Persian painting arranged figures like jewellery on a flat ground. Bihzad's people work. Builders carry bricks up ladders, a servant stirs a pot, Zulaykha chases Yusuf through a palace of locked rooms that you can follow door by door. He hid his signature inside the pictures, on an architectural inscription or a small object.
When Herat fell, Bihzad stayed on under the new rulers, and by the 1520s he was working in Tabriz for the Safavids (a decree dated 1522 naming him head of the royal library is often cited, though its authenticity is disputed). The style outlived the dynasty that paid for it, feeding the Safavid, Mughal and Bukhara schools of the sixteenth century.
How it ended: Shaybani Khan, 1500 to 1507
The end came from the north. Muhammad Shaybani, a Chinggisid khan leading the Uzbek tribes from the Kipchak steppe, took Bukhara and then, in 1500, Samarkand. A young Timurid prince from the Fergana Valley, Babur, slipped back into the city that autumn and held it through a winter siege. In spring 1501 Shaybani beat him at Sar-i Pul, and Babur's own memoir describes how the besieged townspeople ended up eating dogs and donkeys before he left by night through one of the gates.
Herat outlasted Husayn Bayqara by about a year. His sons couldn't agree on a joint defence, and Shaybani took the city in 1507. That's the usual end date for the Timurid Renaissance, though Babur, by then in Kabul, would go on to found the Mughal Empire in 1526 and carry Timurid taste to Agra and Delhi.
Our take: "conquest by barbarians" is the wrong frame. The Shaybanids weren't hostile to the culture they took over. Several Herati artists and calligraphers kept working for them, and in Bukhara they built on the Timurid pattern within a decade. The Kalyan Mosque was rebuilt in 1514, and the ensemble described in our guide to Po-i-Kalyan is essentially Timurid architecture continued by Uzbek khans. What ended in 1507 was a dynasty and a particular pair of capitals, not the craft. Shaybani himself didn't enjoy the result for long: he was killed fighting Shah Ismail of Iran near Merv in 1510.
Where to see it in Uzbekistan
Honest limitation first: almost all of the Herat half lives outside the country. Bihzad's pages, and those attributed to him, are scattered between Cairo, Tehran, Istanbul, London and Washington; Navoi's tomb and Gawhar Shad's minarets are in Herat. What Uzbekistan has is the Samarkand half in full, a few late buildings from Abu Said's reign, and a strong national framing of Navoi.
| Site | City | Date | What it shows |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ulugh Beg Madrasah | Bukhara | 1417 | The earliest of his three madrasahs, still standing opposite the Abdulaziz Khan Madrasah |
| Ulugh Beg Madrasah, Registan | Samarkand | 1417–1420 | The only fifteenth-century building on the square |
| Gur-e-Amir | Samarkand | 1403–1404, later additions | Timur, Shah Rukh and Ulugh Beg in one crypt |
| Observatory site | Samarkand | 1420s | The buried arc of the great sextant, rediscovered 1908 |
| Ishratkhana | Samarkand | c. 1464 | A roofless late-Timurid mausoleum, dome lost in the 1903 earthquake |
| Ak-Saray Mausoleum | Samarkand | 1470s | Crypt of Abu Said's descendants, with restored painted interior |
| Museum of Literature | Tashkent | founded 1939 | Manuscripts and the national story built around Navoi |
The two late buildings most people walk past
Ishratkhana, "house of joy", sits on the eastern side of old Samarkand, just north of the Khoja Abdi Darun shrine. A waqf deed of 1464 ties it to Habiba Sultan Begim, Abu Said's wife, who built it as a family burial place; sources differ on which princess it was first raised for. Excavations in 1940 found somewhere between 23 and 30 burials of women and children in the crypt, depending on which account you follow. The dome and tall drum came down in the 1903 earthquake, and it's been a stabilised shell ever since. Don't expect tilework; do expect the vaulting exposed like a cutaway drawing.
Ak-Saray is easier: about 30 metres southeast of the Gur-e-Amir, it's a small domed tomb from the 1470s built for descendants of Abu Said. The interior painting, with gold on deep blue, was restored in the late 2000s (sources give 2007 and 2008), with part of one wall deliberately left as found. Visitors have been able to go down to the lower burial chamber, though access varies with staffing, so ask at the Gur-e-Amir ticket desk (last checked: September 2026).
Navoi in Tashkent
The State Museum of Literature named after Alisher Navoi was founded in 1939 and holds more than 17,000 exhibits, plus more than 65,000 documents on the lives and work of Uzbek writers, according to Uzbekistan's official tourism portal and the city tourism office. The two official sources give different street addresses (Navoi Avenue 69 and Oybek Street 18), and neither publishes hours or a ticket price, so confirm by phone before crossing town (last checked: September 2026). The Alisher Navoi metro station, with its turquoise domes and scenes from the poems, is the free version; the Registan at night is the grand one.
If you want the Herat half without going to Herat
You don't need to cross into Afghanistan to see the painting. Timurid-era and Bihzad-school pages are held and periodically shown by the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art in Washington, the British Library and the Chester Beatty in Dublin, and several publish high-resolution scans online. Our suggestion: look at a few Herat pages before you fly, then stand under the star patterns on Ulugh Beg's Registan facade. The same workshop habit, many hands on one object, produced both, some 700 km apart.
For the city's listing and the other Timurid monuments inside the protected zone, see UNESCO's Samarkand – Crossroad of Cultures record.