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.