The empire was culturally hybrid, combining Turkic, Mongolic, and Persian influences,[9][10] with the last members of the dynasty being "regarded as ideal Perso-Islamic rulers".

Timur continued vigorous trade relations with Ming China and the Golden Horde, with Chinese diplomats like Ma Huan and Chen Cheng regularly traveling west to Samarkand to buy and sell goods.

[12] Timur personally ordered the name of his state as Turan be carved onto a rock fragment in Ulu Tagh mountainside (present-day Kazakhstan), known today as Karsakpay inscription.

[18] Both terms were concerned with imperial traditions, Iran being Persian and Perso-Islamic, and Turan with the steppe empires of the Turks and the Mongols.

[28] Ulugh Beg included Yāfas (Japheth), Turk, Mughūl, Tātār and Ughūz in the genealogical record of the Genghisids and Timurids.

[28] Timur conquered large parts of the ancient greater Persian territories in Central Asia, primarily Transoxiana and Khorasan, from 1363 onwards with various alliances.

The western Chagatai khans were continually dominated by Timurid princes in the 15th and 16th centuries, and their figurehead importance was eventually reduced into total insignificance.

At the beginning of 1398, Timur sent an army led by his grandson Pir Muhammad to cross the Indus and attack Multan; the successful siege lasted six months.

But in the wake of Shahrukh's death, the Qara Qoyunlu under Jahan Shah drove the Timurids out to eastern Iran after 1447 and also briefly occupied Herat in 1458.

The power of Timurids declined rapidly during the second half of the 15th century, largely due to the Timurid/Mongol tradition of partitioning the empire as well as several civil wars.

Persia, the Caucasus, Mesopotamia, and Eastern Anatolia fell quickly to the Shiite Safavid Empire, secured by Shah Ismail I in the following decade.

Much of the Central Asian lands was overrun by the Uzbeks of Muhammad Shaybani who conquered the key cities of Samarkand and Herat in 1505 and 1507, and who founded the Khanate of Bukhara.

Thus, the Timurid era had a dual character,[31] reflecting both its Turco-Mongol origins and the Persian literary, artistic, and courtly high culture of the dynasty.

[34][35] During the Timurid era, Central Asian society was bifurcated, with the responsibilities of government and rule divided into military and civilian spheres along ethnic lines.

[41] The Timurid sultans, especially Shāh Rukh Mīrzā and his son Mohammad Taragai Oloğ Beg, patronized Persian culture.

The most famous poet of the Timurid era was Nūr ud-Dīn Jāmī, the last great medieval Sufi mystic of Persia and one of the greatest figures in Persian poetry.

[45] According to T. Lenz:[46] It can be viewed as a specific reaction in the wake of Timur's death in 807/1405 to the new cultural demands facing Shahhrokh and his sons, a Turkic military elite no longer deriving their power and influence solely from a charismatic steppe leader with a carefully cultivated linkage to Mongol aristocracy.

Now centered in Khorasan, the ruling house regarded the increased assimilation and patronage of Persian culture as an integral component of efforts to secure the legitimacy and authority of the dynasty within the context of the Islamic Iranian monarchical tradition, and the Baysanghur Shahnameh, as much a precious object as it is a manuscript to be read, powerfully symbolizes the Timurid conception of their own place in that tradition.

[47] During the reign of sultan Husayn Bayqara, the Irshad al-zira'a, a Persian agricultural treatise, was written by Qasim b. Yusuf Abu Nasiri.

[48][49] Based on in-depth, first-hand conversations with farmers, the Irshad al-zira'a, covered the agricultural development of Herat and included minor architectural suggestions for gardens.

[50] The Bāburnāma, the autobiography of Bābur (although being highly Persianized in its sentence structure, morphology, and vocabulary),[51] as well as Mīr Alī Sher Nawā'ī's Chagatai poetry are among the best-known Turkic literary works and have influenced many others.

[31] Timurid artists refined the Persian art of the book, which combines paper, calligraphy, illumination, illustration and binding in a brilliant and colourful whole.

[55] The Mongol ethnicity of the Chaghatayid and Timurid khans was the source of the stylistic depiction of Persian art during the Middle Ages.

Though the ethnic make-up gradually blended into the Iranian and Mesopotamian local populations, the Mongol stylism continued well after and crossed into Asia Minor and even North Africa.

[59] Many of the major imperial monuments of the era are found in Samarkand, including the Gur-i Amir Mausoleum (completed c. 1404),[57] the Bibi-Khanym Mosque (1399–1404), the Shah-i Zinda necropolis (late 14th to early 15th centuries),[59] and the Ulugh Beg Madrasa (1417–1420).

[64] The role of slave soldiers such as the ghilman and mamluks was considerably smaller in Mongol-based armies like the Timurids, as compared to other Islamic societies.

[66] The main symbol of the Timurids is thought to have been the so-called "sign of Timur", which is three equal circles (or rings) arranged in the form of an equilateral triangle ().

Ruy de Clavijo (d. 1412), the ambassador of the king of Castile to the court of Timur in 1403, and the Arab historian, Ibn Arabshah described the sign, which was encountered on the seal of the Amir, as well as on Timurid coins.

[71] Beyond that, the evidence remains scant and ambiguous, but according to Kadoi "one can reasonably conclude that the flag with a tri-partite motif had a certain iconographic association with the Timurid Empire".