A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [186]
The surface of the Moon is dimpled with hundreds of craters. For the Moon-watcher they add interest and texture, but their names also provide another kind of pleasure: they form a kind of dictionary of great scientists. There are craters honouring Halley, Galileo and Copernicus and many more astronomers – and among them is Ulugh Beg, who lived in central Asia at the start of the fifteenth century. Ulugh Beg built a great observatory in Samarkand, in modern Uzbekistan, and compiled a famous catalogue of just under a thousand stars, which became a standard work of reference in both Asia and Europe, and was translated into Latin in Oxford in the seventeenth century – it was this which earned him the honour of that crater on the Moon. He was also briefly the ruler of one of the world’s great powers – the Timurid Empire, which at its height ruled not only central Asia, but also Iran and Afghanistan, as well as parts of Iraq, Pakistan and India. The Timurid Empire had been founded by the redoubtable Tamerlane in the years around 1400. The name of his grandson, the astronomer prince Ulugh Beg, is incised on the cup pictured here.
The Uzbek writer Hamid Ismailov says:
It is extremely exciting that this object belonged to Ulugh Beg, because I can see here in Arabic Ulugh Beg Kuragan and imagine that it served Ulugh Beg while he was looking at the stars. It’s magnificent.
Ulugh Beg’s cup is oval, just over 6 centimetres (2½ inches) high and 20 centimetres (7 inches) long – more a small bowl than a cup – and made from a superbly grained olive-green jade with natural cloud-like markings drifting across the glossy stone. It is very beautiful, but jade was valued in central Asia not just for its beauty, but also for its powers of protection: jade would keep you safe against lightning and earthquakes and – especially important in a cup – against poison. Poison placed in a jade cup, so it was said, would result in the vessel splitting. The owner of this cup could drink without fear.
The cup’s handle is a splendid Chinese dragon. It has its back feet firmly planted on the underside of the bowl, while its mouth and webbed front feet cling to the edge at the top. It peeps over the rim of the bowl, so you can put your finger through the space left by its curving body. It’s a sensuous, intimate experience.
The style of the handle may be Chinese, but the inscription – Ulugh Beg Kuragan – carved into the cup is in Arabic script. Kuragan is a title that literally means ‘royal son-in-law’, but it was used by Tamerlane and later by Ulugh Beg. They had both married princesses of the house of Genghis Khan, and by calling themselves sons-in-law they declared themselves the heirs to the universal sovereignty of Genghis Khan’s Mongol Empire.
The Arabic inscription reading ‘Ulugh Beg Kuragan’
A later repair carries a Turkish inscription: ‘There is no limit to the beneficence of God ‘
So, the cup was probably made in Samarkand, with a handle showing connections east to China, and an inscription looking west to the Islamic world. The Arabic inscription reminds us that this new Timurid Empire created by Tamerlane was energetically Muslim. This is the time of the building of the great mosques of Bukhara and Samarkand, Tashkent and Herat, conceived and executed on a monumental scale, a central Asian equivalent of the European Renaissance.
From about 1410 Ulugh Beg governed Samarkand for his father, and there he built the observatory in which he revised and corrected the astronomical computations of the ancient Greek Ptolemy – the same fusion of Classical Greek and Arab scholarship that we saw in the medieval Hebrew Astrolabe (see Chapter 62). But this central Asian Renaissance prince didn’t take after his military, empire-building grandfather Tamerlane. The historian Beatrice Forbes Manz sums him up:
He was a very poor commander and probably not a great governor in certain ways. He was, however, an excellent cultural patron,