Ulugh Beg (1394 - 1449 CE)

Ulugh Beg (1394 - 1449 CE)

Ulugh Beg (meaning 'great prince') was born Muhammad Targay, the grandson of Shah Temur in Sultaniya. From 1409 he ruled Central Asia, the chief city of which was Samarkand. There, in 1420, he founded an educational institution (madrasah) in which astronomy was the most important subject. He personally interviewed and selected all the lecturers who taught there to determine their knowledge and their qualifications.

Four years after founding the madrasah, Ulugh Beg constructed a three-storey observatory for solar observations in general, and for observations of the moon and planets in particular. The main instrument of the observatory was the Fakhri Sextant, which had a radius of around 40 metres, making it the largest astronomical instrument of its type in the world.
The observations made by Ulugh Beg were very advanced for his time and surprisingly accurate.

His calculation that the stellar year is 365 days, 6 hours, 10 minutes and 8 seconds, is remarkable as it is only 62 seconds more than the present estimation.

Ulugh Beg assembled the best-known mathematicians of his day in the observatory, and equipped it with the finest instruments available. Among the mathematicians was Ghiyath al-Din al-Kashani, whose mastery of the theory of numbers was unmatched until fairly recent times.

An important result of the work of Ulugh Beg was the astronomical tables called the Zij of Ulugh Beg. This includes tables of calendar calculations, of trigonometry, and of the planets, as a well as a star catalogue.

The observatory was later reduced to ruins but was rediscovered by the archaeologist VL Vyatkin in 1908.

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