Shaped like a Mexican sombrero, this museum was built to commemorate the 600th birthday of Timur. There are almost no genuine artefacts here, but there are some interesting displays on Timur's descendants and their almost exclusively violent deaths. Timur's great-great-grandson Umar Sheikh, for example, 'unexpectedly died falling into the abyss from his pigeonry'. Look out for the copy of the 15th-century letter from Timur to King Charles I of France.
Other interesting exhibits include the 14th-century stone pond from Samarkand's now-vanished Bagi Baland garden and a model of what the Bibi Khanum Mosque would have looked like (very Persian) had it ever been completed.
