The popular belief that European astronomy from the late Middle Ages and early Modern Age was more advanced than that of other world civilizations is debatable, as there are several specific examples indicating that in other places it was comparable and even superior. The Mayans had a solar calendar more accurate than the Julian and even the current Gregorian calendar, while the Muslim scholar Ulugh Beg not only determined the length of the tropical year with greater precision than Copernicus but also did the same with the obliquity of the Earth’s ecliptic with measurements that have only been matched today. And, while we’re at it, let’s talk about this figure who was the founder of the observatory that bore his name, considered one of the best of its time.
It was 1908 when a Russian archaeologist of Uzbek origin named Vassily Lavrentyevich Vyatkin was excavating on a hill on the outskirts of Samarkand when he found the ruins of what had been the aforementioned observatory, destroyed in 1449 upon Ulugh Beg’s death. There, he uncovered an underground trench eleven meters long by two meters wide and three stories high which, with calibration marks along its entire length, followed the meridian’s length.
In it -underground, to protect it from earthquakes- was placed a great arc with a 40.4-meter radius which, according to a Turkish witness who had the chance to see it personally, was as tall as the dome of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople.
This was the base structure of the so-called Fakhri sextant, the largest of its time until the 17th century, which had stairs on the sides to make measurements, as it served to determine noon. Each day, the team of astronomers working at the observatory calculated noon according to the meridional height of the Sun, along with other complementary data such as its degree of declination (angle between the Sun-Earth line and the celestial equatorial plane) or the distance to the zenith (its highest point in the sky). All this can give us an idea of how advanced their knowledge was, which allowed them to forecast eclipses or know exactly when dawn would occur.
Not only that. Ulugh Beg and his assistants calculated that the tropical year (shorter than the sidereal year because it’s not the time it takes Earth to complete a full revolution around the Sun but the time between two successive passes of the Sun through the mean equinox, that is, from spring to spring or autumn to autumn) was 365 days, 5 hours, 49 minutes, and 15 seconds; today, with current technology, we know it lasts 365 days, 6 hours, 9 minutes, and 9.76 seconds, but at that time that mark improved Copernicus’s calculation by half a minute.
Also, as mentioned, they determined Earth’s obliquity (angle of inclination of Earth’s rotation axis relative to the ecliptic, the curve that the Sun seemingly follows around Earth) at 23.52 degrees, much more accurate than those left by Copernicus and even later astronomers like Tycho Brahe (although it should be clarified that this obliquity changes over time at a rate of 0.47 seconds per century and is now 23 degrees, 26 minutes, and 14 seconds).
Ulugh Beg wasn’t just anyone, as his grandfather was none other than Tamerlane and his father, Shahrukh Mirza, served as governor of the eastern part of the Timurid Empire; therefore, of Persia and Transoxiana (a region of Turkestan), what is now Uzbekistan. It’s believed that Ulugh, the firstborn, must have been born in Soltaniyeh (Iran) around 1393 or 1394, although he probably settled in Samarkand when it was designated as capital; in fact, at just sixteen years old, he assumed governance of the city, which he never abandoned, and three years later became sovereign of all Transoxiana, taking, according to his rank, thirteen wives. There’s one more biographical detail to highlight: the first news of him in the West was provided by Rui González de Clavijo, ambassador of the Castilian king Henry III in Tamerlane’s court, who met him when he was still a child.
Having received splendid scientific training, a product of that court’s cultural splendor, he acquired knowledge of medicine (he is credited with inventing a potion to treat intestinal disorders and various recipes using dried fruits to enhance the sexual potency of newlyweds, something later taken up by Avicenna).
Ulugh Beg, who also made important contributions to mathematics (specifically in spherical geometry and trigonometry, in which he left tables with sine values and tangents of eight decimals), didn’t neglect the other side of culture and was an accomplished poet who debated in verse, according to the tradition of Bahri bayt (a kind of competition in which each contender must argue using as their beginning the last letter used by their opponent).
He spoke five languages and promoted arts and education. For the latter, he founded a higher madrasa (school) whose faculty was composed of dozens of scholars from throughout the Timurid Empire, such as the Turk Qāḍī Zāda al-Rūmī or the Persian Jamshīd al-Kāshīallī (both astronomers and mathematicians) and accepted students also from various backgrounds, with Ali Qushji being the most prominent because he would become a skilled astronomical physicist and assistant to Ulugh Beg himself.
Of course, the field in which he truly shone was astronomy, to which he became devoted since childhood, when he accompanied his father on campaigns through Central Asia and northern India. The visit to the Persian observatory of Maragheh, which had been directed two centuries earlier by the prestigious Nasir al-Din al-Tusi (who is considered the creator of trigonometry), was cathartic.
In 1428, perhaps remembering that intense moment, he ordered the construction of the Gurjani Zij in Samarkand, the aforementioned astronomical observatory. In it, he had installed the most advanced technology of the time: there were several large fakhri (sextants), of which the largest was the one described before, enormous sundials, astrolabes, armillary spheres, a colossal gnomon…
This allowed him to determine in 1437 that the sidereal year (the normal one) lasted 365 days, 6 hours, 10 minutes, and 8 seconds, which represents an error of 58 seconds more. Copernicus improved it by calculating 365 days, 6 hours, 9 minutes, and 12 seconds, 28 seconds less (and, therefore, an error of only two seconds), but he didn’t do so until 1525, curiously taking as a source the work that another Muslim scholar, Thabit ibn Qurra, had done.
But that wasn’t all. Starting from the Kitāb suwar al-kawākib (Book of Fixed Stars), whose author was a 10th-century Persian astronomer named Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi, Ulugh Beg created a catalog that listed more than a thousand stars, almost as many as Ptolemy had counted. It was the basis for Zij-i Sultani (Sultan’s Tables), an astronomical table published between 1438 and 1439 and collectively signed by the observatory team, including the aforementioned Jamshīd al-Kāshī and Ali Qushji.
It constituted the best stellar catalog created to date, not surpassed until the works of the Ottoman Taqi ad-Din Muhammad ibn Ma’ruf and the Dane Tycho Brahe in the 16th century, as it readjusted the position of 992 stars (others couldn’t be seen from Samarkand’s latitude) and corrected some of Ptolemy’s errors. In fact, Zij-i Sultani was republished in Oxford in 1665 with the title Tabulae longitudinis et latitudinis stellarum fixarum ex Observacionese Ulugbeighi and, subsequently, new editions were released in 1767, 1843, and 1917.
Samarkand became the astronomical capital of the world, an even greater merit considering that the telescope hadn’t yet been invented (hence the large size of the sextant and the rest of the equipment). Thus, it is only fair that today this curious figure is honored by naming a lunar crater and an asteroid after him.
Paradoxically, Ulugh Beg wasn’t his real name, as that was just a nickname translatable as Great Prince, his actual name being something more complicated: Mirza Muhammad bin Tāraghay Shahrukh. The paradox is twofold if one considers that, in reality, his work as a ruler didn’t shine as brightly as his scientific achievements.
Indeed, in that turbulent empire, where even family members waited for a sign of weakness to usurp power, Ulugh Beg was defeated in a succession war after his father’s death when his nephews allied against him. The blow must have been even harder when he discovered that his own son was also taking up arms against him. Abdal-Latif Mirza, as the son was called, defeated his father in the Battle of Damascus in 1449 and, although he allowed him to go into exile in Mecca, ordered his assassination (and that of his brother) before he could arrive, earning the nickname Padarkush (Patricide). Ulugh Beg’s mortal remains were buried at the feet of Tamerlane’s in the Gur-e-Amir, the latter’s mausoleum in Samarkand, and were discovered by Soviet archaeologists in 1941.
This article was first published on our Spanish Edition on October 11, 2019: El observatorio de Ulugh Beg en Samarcanda, redescubierto en 1908, está alineado con el meridiano
SOURCES
J.J. O’Connor y Ed Robinson, Ulugh Beg
Helaine Selin, ed, Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures
Benno van Dalen, Ulugh Beg: Muḥammad Ṭaraghāy ibn Shāhrukh ibn Tīmūr
Heather Hobden, Ulughbek and his observatory in Samarkand
Đhsan Fazlıoğlu, The Samarqand Mathematical-Astronomical School: A Basis for Ottoman Philosophy and Science
Wikipedia, Observatorio de Ulugh Beg
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