Soviet scientists opened Timur's tomb on 19 June 1941 over the objections of Samarkand's clerics, and the keeper who read out its warning was ordered arrested

Timur died at Otrar in February 1405. His body was embalmed, laid in an ebony coffin and buried in the Gur-e Amir in Samarkand under a large slab of jade. In 1740 Nader Shah tried to carry off the stone, which broke in two, and his advisers urged him to send it back^†. In 1941 Stalin sent the anthropologist Mikhail Gerasimov to open the tombs of Timur and his descendants. Atlas Obscura reports that Samarkand's religious leaders tried to stop it and that the keeper of the tomb, Masood Alaev, translated the inscription: "When I rise from the dead, the world shall tremble." Moscow ordered Alaev arrested for spreading panic and the tomb opened. The slab was raised on 19 June 1941. A second warning is said to have been found inside the coffin; people close to Gerasimov call that story a fabrication. Germany invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June. Britannica says the commission found a powerfully built man of above average height, lame in both right limbs. Gerasimov rebuilt Timur's face from the skull. Timur was reburied with Islamic rites in late 1942, during the Soviet counter-offensive at Stalingrad. He lies in the Gur-e Amir in 2026.