Early Life
He was a grandson of the great conqueror, Timur (Tamerlane) (1336–1405), and the oldest son of Shah Rukh, both of whom came from the Turkicized Barlas tribe of Transoxiana (now Uzbekistan). His mother was a Persian noblewoman named Goharshad. Ulugh Beg was born in Sultaniyeh in Persia during Timur's invasion. As a child he wandered through a substantial part of the Middle East and India as his grandfather expanded his conquests in those areas. After Timur's death, however, and the accession of Ulugh Beg's father to much of the Timurid Empire, he settled in Samarkand, which had been Timur's capital. After Shah Rukh moved the capital to Herat (in modern Afghanistan), sixteen-year-old Ulugh Beg became his governor in Samarkand in 1409. In 1411, he became the sovereign ruler of the whole Mavarannahr khanate.
Read more about this topic: Ulugh Beg
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.”
—Eudora Welty (b. 1909)
“Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing—to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)