The necropolis called Shah-i Zinda, the living king, grew around a shrine attributed to Qutham ibn Abbas, a cousin of the Prophet said to have been killed while praying and, in local tradition, to be living still beneath the ground. A lane of tiled mausoleums climbs the hillside towards it, most of them built for women of Timur's family, and the site remains a place of visit rather than only a monument.
Timur made Samarkand his capital and built at a scale his craftsmen, brought forcibly from Iran, India and Syria, could barely execute; the vast Bibi Khanum mosque began falling down almost at once. Under his successors the Registan received three madrasas facing a single square, and one of them, Sher-Dor, carries tigers and a human faced sun in tile across its front, a deliberate departure from the usual avoidance of living figures on a religious building.
Ulugh Beg, Timur's grandson, was an astronomer who governed. He built an observatory with a huge stone sextant sunk into a trench, whose arc still survives, and produced a catalogue of over a thousand stars and a set of tables that corrected Ptolemy and were used from Istanbul to India; they were printed at Oxford in the seventeenth century. Astronomy and astrology were not separate enterprises, and the tables served both. He was killed on his son's orders in 1449. Outside the city the tomb of al-Bukhari, whose collection of hadith is the most authoritative in Sunni Islam, is a pilgrimage site rebuilt on a grand scale after independence.