While lacking the ferocity and seemingly tireless aggression of Temür himself, Shah Rukh and Ulugh Beg had maintained a degree of Timurid authority in Iran, Mawarannahr and Afghanistan for four decades. However, Timurid power quickly atrophied after Shah Rukh's death in 1447 and Ulugh Beg's assassination in 1449. During this second half of the Timurid century that concluded with the Uzbek occupation of Samarqand in 1501 and Herat in 1507, Temür's heirs not only dissipated their collective power in internecine struggles, but by that time also groups whom Temür had terrorized and cowed, recovered and reasserted themselves. The outer boundaries of the Timurid Empire began to shrink as Uzbeks (Özbeks), Turkmen and Mongols moved on the principal centres of Timurid wealth and power in Mawarannahr, Fars, Iraq-i ʿAjam and Khurāsān. Meanwhile these weakened rulers of territories, whose kingdoms by the late fifteenth century had shrunk to little more than a congeries of Timurid city-states, competed for cultural precedence, creating a fin-de-siècle era of literary and artistic florescence. Among these states Herat particularly resembled a dying star that flashed out briefly but spectacularly in the Islamic world before its extinction. Still, despite the disintegration of the late Timurid world, the idea of a Timurid revival survived in the minds of its protagonists, one of whom, Ẓahīr al-Dīn Muḥammad Bābur, laid the foundation in 1526 for a Timurid renaissance that became known later as the Mughal Empire of India.