Ulugh Beg
Ulugh Beg was a
Timurid ruler as well as an
astronomer,
mathematician and
sultan. His commonly known name is not truly a personal name, but rather a moniker, which can be loosely translated as "Great Ruler" or "Patriarch Ruler" and was the Turkic equivalent of Timur's Perso-Arabic title
Amir-e Kabir. His real name was
Mirza Mohammad Taragai bin Shahrukh. Ulugh Beg was also notable for his work in astronomy-related mathematics, such as
trigonometry and spherical geometry.
He was the grandson of the conqueror
Timur the Lame and oldest son of Shah Rukh, both of whom came from the
Mongol Barlas tribe of
Transoxiana .
Encyclopedia
Ulugh Beg was a
Timurid ruler as well as an
astronomer,
mathematician and
sultan. His commonly known name is not truly a personal name, but rather a moniker, which can be loosely translated as "Great Ruler" or "Patriarch Ruler" and was the Turkic equivalent of Timur's Perso-Arabic title
Amir-e Kabir. His real name was
Mirza Mohammad Taragai bin Shahrukh. Ulugh Beg was also notable for his work in astronomy-related mathematics, such as
trigonometry and spherical geometry.
He was the grandson of the conqueror
Timur the Lame and oldest son of Shah Rukh, both of whom came from the
Mongol Barlas tribe of
Transoxiana . His mother was the
Persian noble
Goharshad. Ulugh Beg was born in
Sultaniyeh in
Iran. As a child he wandered through a substantial chunk of the
Middle East and
India as his grandfather expanded his conquests in those areas. With Timur's death, however, and the accession of Ulugh's father to much of the
Timurid Empire, he settled in
Samarkand which had been Timur's capital. After Shah Rukh moved the capital to
Herat , sixteen year-old Ulugh Beg became the shah's governor in Samarkand in 1409. In 1411 he became a sovereign of the whole
Mavarannahr khanate.
The teenaged ruler set out to turn the city into an intellectual center for the empire. In 1417-1420 he built a
madrasa on
Registan Square in Samarkand, and invited numerous Islamic astronomers and mathematicians to study there. Ulugh Beg's most famous pupil in
mathematics was
Ghiyath al-Kashi .
His own particular interests concentrated on
astronomy, and in 1428 he built an enormous
observatory, called the
Gurkhani Zij, similar to
Tycho Brahe's later
Uraniborg. Lacking
telescopes to work with, he increased his accuracy by increasing the length of his
sextant; the so-called Fakhri Sextant had a radius of circa 36 meters and the optical separability of 180" . Using it he compiled the 1437
Zij-i Sultani of 994
stars, generally considered the greatest of star catalogues between those of
Ptolemy and Brahe. The serious errors which he found in the Arabian star catalogues induced him to redetermine the positions of 992 fixed stars, to which he added 27 stars from
Al Sufi's catalogue from 964, which were too far south for observation from Samarkand. This catalogue, the first original one since
Ptolemy, was edited by Thomas Hyde at Oxford in 1665 under the tile
Tabulae longitudinis et latitudinis stellarum fixarum ex observatione Ulugbeighi by G. Sharpe in 1767, and in 1843 by Francis Baily in vol. xiii. of the Memoirs of the Royal Astronomical Society.
In 1437 Ulugh Beg determined the length of the sidereal year as 365.2570370...
d = 365
d 6
h 10
m 8
s . In his measurements within many years he used a 50 m high
gnomon. This value was improved by 28
s 88 years later in 1525 by
Nicolaus Copernicus , who appealed to the estimation of Thabit ibn Qurra , which was accurate to +2
s.
Unfortunately Ulugh's scientific prowess was not matched by his administrative skills. He lost some battles to rival kingdoms, and in 1448 massacred the people of
Herat after defeating Mirza Ala-u-dowleh, son of Bai sunqur. Within two years he was beheaded by his own eldest son, 'Abd al-Latif while on his way to
Mecca. Eventually he was rehabilitated by his relative
Babur, founder of the
Mughal Empire, who placed Ulugh Beg's remains in the tomb of Timur in Samarkand, found by archeologists in 1941.
In honour of his achievements the Ulugh Beigh crater on the
Moon was named after him by the German astronomer
Johann Heinrich von Mädler in his 1830 map of the Moon.
See also
External links
References
