Here’s yet another Empire which it’s easy not to know anything about. (As for me, I’d heard the name, and the names of their rulers and city; but those were really just dots on a map, so far as I was concerned. At least now they’re dots on the map with a neat jade cup.) It easy to despair, however, because you end up wondering just how many more of these worlds and kingdoms there are about which, after all those years of schooling, your ignorance is complete and total!
The Timurids were halfway between Genghis Khan and the Mongols and Osman and the Ottomans, ethnically, geographically, temporally, and in other ways. The important names to know are Timur, who founded the dynasty, known as “Timur the Lame,” which was Tamburlaine the Great to Kit Marlowe and Tamerlano to G. F. Handel, in case you’re following history through obscure once-famous dramas; and his grandson “Babur”, who founded the Mughal Empire that was ruling India when the British & friends got there. The Timurids were Muslim, their capitol was in Samarkand, modern Uzbekistan (all these empires in that bit of central Asia! Nobody can make one that just lasts forever), and it’s right there, like the David Vases, on the road between Iraq and China. Thus this jade cup, which has Chinese-derived dragon handles and Arabic writing. This cup belonged to Ulugh Beg, grandson of Timur, later murdered by his own son after being deposed. He was apparently a much better mathemetician and astronomer than he was a king; he founded the observatory at Samarkand, which is still in operation, and they named a sea on the moon after him. (Once you’re familiar with terrestrial geography and the histories of the various empires, that’s the next place to go study!)
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