Baysunkur felt resistance to this powerful combination hopeless, and he fled[420] to his brother Mas`ūd for protection, dying in obscurity in A.H. 905 (1499). His dominions were, in name, divided between Sultan `Ali and Bāber Mīrzā, but their extreme youth forbade them to assert authority over the powerful nobles who had usurped every species of power. They abandoned the contest; and a chieftain named Mohammad Khān Shaybāni, a descendant of Jūjī, the son of Chingiz Khān, seized the throne of Samarkand. Thus fell the dynasty of Tīmūr, after a duration of 140 years.[421] Their age has cast undying lustre on the Turkish name, for their own culture attracted an array of scholars and men of science whose works recall the brightest days of Moorish dominion in Spain. Shāh Rukh was a song-writer of no mean order; while Ulugh Beg won fame in the severer studies of the mathematician and astronomer. Bāber Mīrzā, who afterwards sat on the throne of Delhi, was famous alike as statesman, philosopher, and writer; and, indeed, there was hardly one of Tīmūr’s descendants but manifested a taste for letters. The annals of this house are rendered illustrious by the names of poets, philosophers, and theologians which are still household words throughout the East. During this period of Central Asian history, Bokhārā, Samarkand, and Merv all gave birth to distinguished Mohammedan writers, as did many other less important towns of Transoxiana and Turkestān; but rarely did these authors employ in their compositions the principal vernacular of these countries, namely, Eastern Turkish. All theological and didactic works were written--as they still are--in Arabic: and thus it is that many of the masterpieces of Arabic literature owe their origin to Mohammedans of Central Asia. The alternative literary language was Persian, which probably came in vogue for poetical compositions about the time of the Tāhirides.
In the days of the Tīmūrides, however, the dialect of Turkish, known as Chaghatāy, became honoured by a definite position in literature, chiefly in the department of poetry. The Chaghatāy dialect is the oldest form of Turkish which has come down to us in the Arabic character, and it is still spoken throughout Transoxiana, Turkestān, and Kāshghar. As with the Aryan family of languages so with the Turkish, the farther east we go the nearer we approach its source. In Yarkand and Kāshghar this language is called Turkī, while in Samarkand and Bokhārā it is known by the name of Uzbegī. Although Uzbegī is the language most commonly heard in the bazaars of Samarkand and Bokhārā, it does not hold the field alone, its rival being a corrupt form of Persian spoken by the Tājiks, and hence known as Tājikī. This dialect, while on the one hand preserving many old Persian words which in Persia itself have dropped out of the spoken tongue, has, on the other hand, with regard to its grammatical forms and its syntax, been greatly influenced by its Turkish neighbour.[422] Under the Tīmūides there flourished a poet named Mīr `Alī Shīr, or Navāy, who certainly did more than any other to enrich the Chaghatāy literature, and who may justly be regarded the national poet _par excellence_ of the Eastern Turks.