A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [187]
An envoy from Ming China who visited Samarkand around 1415 was taken aback at the free-wheeling manners of the Timurid capital, which still smacked of the easy-going informality of a semi-nomadic society. It was an odd city, designed to accommodate both modern buildings and traditional tents, the yurts that the Timurids had brought with them from the steppes. For the rarefied Chinese visitor, Samarkand was the Wild West:
They have no principles or propriety. When inferiors meet superiors, they come forward, shake hands, and that is all! When women go out, they ride horses and mules. If they meet someone on the road, they chat, laugh and fool around with no sense of shame. Moreover they utter lewd words when conversing. The men are even more despicable.
Perhaps it is not surprising that the Timurid Empire, bound together only by personal loyalties, didn’t survive long. It was run by people more at home on the steppes than in a government office. There was no established habit of orderly central power and barely any working bureaucracy. The death of every ruler brought chaos. Ulugh Beg’s father had struggled to rebuild the Timurid Empire, but after his death in 1447 Ulugh Beg would reign for only two years before he lost control. He tried hard to use the reputation of Tamerlane to bolster his authority, burying his illustrious grandfather under a monument made of rare black jade, inscribed in Arabic for all to see: ‘When I rise, the world will tremble’. He must have longed for the return of a power that he knew he himself could never match. The earth was unlikely to tremble at Ulugh Beg. Hamid Ismailov sees a poetic, metaphorical meaning in his green jade cup:
The symbolism of this cup is seen throughout the whole region as a sort of destiny of a person. When we say ‘the cup is filled’, so destiny is fulfilled. And so, for example, Babur, who was a great poet as well as the nephew of Ulugh Beg, says in one of his poems that troops of sadness are countless, and the only way to deal with them is bringing thicker wine and keeping a cup as a shield. That is the symbolism of the cup – it’s a shield, a metaphysical shield against the troops of sadness.
But it was a shield that failed, and towards the end of his life, the troops of sadness came crowding in on Ulugh Beg. His two-year rule of the empire was as disastrous as it was brief. Very unmetaphorical troops invaded Samarkand, and in 1449 he was defeated and captured by his own eldest son, handed over to a slave and decapitated. But Ulugh Beg was not forgotten. His great-nephew Babur, who became the first Mughal emperor of India, honoured him by interring his remains in the black jade monument alongside those of the great Tamerlane.
By that time the Timurid Empire was over. Once again central Asia fragmented and became the theatre of competing influences, among them the great new power in the West, the Ottoman Empire. That later development, too, is recorded in our cup. At some point, presumably long after Ulugh Beg’s death, the precious jade cup must have been dropped, because it is badly cracked at one end. But the crack has been covered up by a repair in silver, and on the silver is an inscription. It was probably engraved in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, 300 years after its owner’s execution. The inscription is in Ottoman Turkish, so the cup by then had probably found its way to Istanbul. It reads, ‘There is no limit to the beneficence of God’.
The unfortunate Ulugh Beg might not have agreed. By the time this cup was re-inscribed in Turkish, Russia was already