Mirzo Ulugbek Museum Complex

About

The present museum building went up in 2010 next to the excavated foundations of Ulugbek's observatory. Its portal echoes the entrance portals of medieval madrasahs and its plan recalls a clock face, so that the museum and the observatory remains read as a single ensemble.

Mirzo Ulugbek was born in 1394, a grandson of Amir Timur, and at fifteen was given Maverannahr to govern from Samarkand — a rule that lasted forty years. In 1420 he built a madrasah and gathered the finest scholars of the age: Qazi-zade Rumi, Jamshid al-Kashi, Ali Qushji. Their calculations exposed a gap between the published coordinates of stars and observed positions, and Ulugbek resolved to build an observatory of his own.

The site chosen was the Kuhak rise east of the city. Reconstructions give the building as a cylinder some 48 metres across and 30 high. Its principal instrument was a huge quadrant set exactly on the meridian in a trench two metres wide and eleven deep. The above-ground part is lost; the underground section survives, protected since 1914 by a roof built over it. The arcs are laid in fired brick faced with marble, degree marks run every 72 centimetres, and grooves along the arcs once held copper rules for dividing degrees into minutes and seconds.

The observatory's other instruments — armillary spheres and devices for taking the azimuth and altitude of celestial bodies — have not survived; Ulugbek's globe is in a private collection in Britain. The museum shows models of the observatory after the reconstructions of M. S. Bulatov and V. A. Nielsen, rebuilt instruments, and a seventeenth-century astrolabe by Muhammad Zaman ibn Khoja Sharafiddin Hasan.

The great result of the Samarkand school was the Zij of Ulugbek, with a catalogue of 1,018 stars compiled over years of observation. John Greaves first published it in Europe at Oxford in 1648, and in 1690 Johannes Hevelius set it in his Prodromus Astronomiae beside the catalogues of Ptolemy, Tycho Brahe and others — in the engraving Ulugbek sits at one table with five great astronomers.