After so much death and religion it's a relief to get clear of the city center and inhale some secularity on the hill from which Ulug Bek studied the heavens. The remains of his observatory are 20 minutes' walk north of the bazaar up the Tashkent road. Alternatively, take marshrutnoe taxi 17 from the Hotel Samarkand or the bazaar. 

The Conquest of the Stars 

The grandson of Tamerlane, Ulug Bek was less interested in conquering the earth than the stars. His was the best-equipped observatory in the medieval world; a magnet for leading scientists and a center of progressive, often heretical thought. 'Where knowledge starts religion ends/ was the motto of his teacher, Kazi Zade Rumi, and Ulug Bek's quest for enlightenment led him to sponsor debates on such topics as the existence of God. This did not go down too well with Muslim orthodoxy, and among those who found his beliefs hard to stomach was his own son, who assassinated him on 29 October 1449. Shortly afterwards, religious fanatics tore down the observatory. 

Ulug Bek's astronomical observations, which put him on a par with Copernicus or Kepler, did not become known in the West until 1648, when a copy of his Catalogue of Stars was discovered in Oxford's Bodleian Library. He had plotted the position of the moon, the planets, the sun and 1018 other stars with amazing precision, and calculated the length of the year to within 58 seconds (or even less; the earth span slower then than it does now). These were some of the greatest achievements of the 'non-optical' (pre-telescope) era of astronomy. 

Having fallen victim to one orthodoxy, Ulug Bek was a ready-made hero for another. The Soviets made him the object of a minor cult and officially designated his murder as 'tragic'. 

What nobody knew was where, or quite how, Ulug Bek had worked. Then in 1908, after years spent studying ancient manuscripts, a Russian primary school teacher, amateur archaeologist and former army officer called Vladimir Viatkin unearthed the lower portion of a giant sextant on Kukhak Hill beside the road to Tashkent. It was one of the major finds of the 20th century. 

The original sextant was a perfect arc of marble-clad brick, 63 metres long with a radius of 40 m, calibrated in degrees and minutes, decorated with the signs of the zodiac and aligned with one of the earth's meridians. Observations and measurements were made with an astrolabe mounted on metal rails either side of the sextant. What survives, complete with calibrations and fragments of rail, is the lower section of the arc, set in a deep rock trench to minimize disturbances from earth tremors. The arc originally continued upwards above the trench inside a round, three-storeyed observatory at least 30 m high. Traces of its foundations are all that remain. The top two floors were arcades used as solar and lunar calendars. Ulug Bek probably used the ground floor as a summer residence. There is a small museum on Uzbek astronomy and the opening of Tamerlane's tomb (see Gur Emir below). The astronomy section includes an old engraving of great astronomers in which Ulug Bek sits alongside Copernicus and Galileo dressed as a Cossack, whose garb was the most eastern-looking the engraver could envisage. The modest grave near the entrance to the sextant is Viatkin's; he was buried here in  
accordance with his will. 
 
 
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