Samarkand is a city of gorgeous tiled architecture, but in a way the most interesting site is the observatory of Ulugh Beg. You can only see the remaining sextant now, although a small bit of the observatory building has been reconstructed to help visitors imagine its earlier splendor. The astronomical discoveries made here are awe-inspiring enough, but the architecture must have been dazzling even to people who had no idea what the building was for.
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Have a look at the photos on these sites to bring the place to life:
Observatory of Ulugh Beg, Samarkand (the first picture shows what the huge sextant looks like today; scroll down to see a very partial reconstruction and the model of how it may have looked when it was in use)
The clever prince Ulugh Beg built — and used — an ingenious observatory in the 15th century (Astronomy Magazine online)
Registan Square (see some photos of Samarkand’s old buildings and read about the old city’s central square)
Music: Jens East — Daybreak (ft. Henk) www.soundcloud.com/jenseast
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution V4.0
Transcription (remember, this is a direct transcription of what I said and is not actually how I write!):
Welcome to 9 Minutes of Wonder. I’m Betsy Hedberg. I hope this podcast will help you rekindle your sense of wonder for this awe-inspiring world. If you like what you hear in the next few minutes, please subscribe and share.
Hi everyone! Today I am going to continue my Uzbekistan theme by talking a little bit about the city of Samarkand.
This is a city in modern-day Uzbekistan that I recently visited. I was hoping to do a recording when I was there, but I was busy. I didn’t have time, so I’ll talk about it now.
But Samarkand also has a famous name, right? You’ve probably heard of it if you studied, well, we all studied the Silk Road at some point when we were maybe 13, 12, 10 years old. And Samarkand was a major center of trade in Central Asia and the trade between East Asia and the Middle East and Europe back many centuries ago.
And today the older section of Samarkand is just exquisite. It is filled with awe-inspiring architecture, multiple colors, a lot of turquoise, beautiful turquoise domes. It is just phenomenal, and I hope that you’ll look at some photos. I’ll share some photos or some links to photos in the show notes here.
When I was there, of course, I marveled at the architecture. Most of the buildings are restored, but they also have a lot of the original tile work. And of course they represented power. In this case it was the power of Timur, or Amir Timur, the king or the emperor who had conquered that area in the 14th century and had all of these structures, or many of these structures, built.
So now we get to go look at them and there are a lot of tourists there who are also just awe-inspired by what they saw. And of course these gorgeous old buildings all had purposes, religious purposes for religious education, but also for scientific education. And there were also mausoleums and mosques for religious worship. But that’s not what I’m gonna focus on today.
What I really want to focus on is how awe-inspiring it was to see the remnants of the old observatory. There’s not a lot of it left, but knowing that they found some old parts of it and learning about this observatory was just very cool because we didn’t learn about this in school, at least I didn’t. My education about science was, well, we learned about the ancient Greeks and then we skipped to the Enlightenment and we didn’t learn about this period of Islamic science that was more advanced than European science at the time.
And we’re talking about 1000 years ago and into this time that I was mentioning the 14th century. And this observatory was built by Emperor Timur’s grandson, and his name was Ulugbek. I saw a model of the observatory, and I will also try to share with you a link so that you can see what the model looked like.
But it was 30 meters tall, so that’s about three stories tall, and 46 meters in diameter. In other words, it was huge, and it was decorated with more of these beautiful glazed tiles. So it was not just functional, it was totally ornate.
It must have been quite a sight, really. And this guy, Ulugbek, he was the ruler at the time, but he was also fascinated with science and mathematics and he was very well educated. And his real interest actually was in studying the cosmos. So he had this observatory built.
By the way, why do I find this wonder-inspiring? Well, it’s huge, beautiful, old, an interesting part of history, and it was really accurate as well. Ulugbek was able to use this observatory, and of course he had people, students who worked with him, but he and his students were able to take extremely accurate measurements in this observatory.
They established the position of over 1000 stars, they figured out the paths of the planets, the Sun and the Moon, and the length of the solar year, and the angle of the Earth’s tilt. And these are all things that were done in the 15th century in this observatory in present-day Uzbekistan.
You probably remember learning about Copernicus, right? In 1543, Copernicus published the revolutionary idea that— the revolutionary truth — that the Earth revolves around the Sun. And Copernicus was apparently very strongly influenced by the Islamic astronomers, including Ulugbek. So that’s another fascinating part about the Silk Road trade, is that it didn’t just trade silk and goods, it traded ideas. And the Europeans learned a lot from the Islamic astronomers and scientists and mathematicians who were there at the time that Samarkand was at its full height.
Ulugbek and his students studied and debated and then improved upon the ancient Greek philosophers and mathematicians, as well as famous Islamic scientists and astronomers who had come before them. So this wasn’t just one guy, this was a group of people, of course a group of men, who studied astronomy and advanced mathematics and they did calculations to improve upon it, in these gorgeous, gorgeous buildings. I find that really awe-inspiring and really cool.
And it was really cool to be there and see it, even though the observatory is in ruins. Why is the observatory in ruins? It’s because things got kind of chaotic just about 30 years after it was constructed. Ulugbek was not everybody’s friend, in fact he had some enemies. The more conservative clergy didn’t appreciate his devotion and attention to math and science, they wanted him to pay more attention to religion and religious rules, but also to expanding power. And he had a rebellious son who actually ended up having him assassinated. So then things got nasty, obviously, and they tore the observatory down. So it only lasted about 30 years and that’s why it’s in ruins now.
Anyway, please look at the photos of this gorgeous city. I think you’ll find it inspiring too.
And I think, you know, even if you’re not really interested in the scientific stories, you can appreciate gorgeous architecture when you see it. And I hope you can appreciate beauty. Sometimes beauty isn’t created just for its own sake, it’s created to express power and to express a religious devotion.
And this architecture was both of those. And whatever you think of those motives, it’s still just gorgeous. So look at the photos and enjoy.