Kohinoor: The Story of the World’s Most Infamous Diamond

by William Dalrymple

ten-year-old maharaja of Punjab, Duleep Singh,

Maharaja Ranjit Singh,

Rani Jindan,

Treaty of Lahore,

‘The gem called the Koh-i-Noor, which was taken from Shah Sooja ool-Moolk by Maharaja Runjeet Singh, shall be surrendered by the Maharaja of Lahore to the Queen of England.’

Lord Dalhousie,

1839, at the death of Ranjit Singh,

Dr Login, Duleep Singh’s stiff British guardian.

Theo Metcalfe

as handed down from family to family, this diamond was extracted from the mine Koh-i-Noor,

during the lifetime of Krishna, who is supposed to have lived 5,000 years since…’7

Emperors of the Ghoree dynasty,

Tughluq–Syed and the Lodhi dynasties,

family of Timur [the Mughals] and remained in their possession until the ...

the Persian warlord Nader Shah, ‘the Emperor and he e...

was named Koh-i-Noor, or Mountain of Light,...

the Koh-i-Noor, which weighed 190.3 metric carats when it arrived in Britain, had had at least two comparable sisters, the Darya-i-Noor, or Sea of Light, now in Tehran (today estimated at 175–195 metric

carats), and the Great Mughal Diamond, believed by most modern gemmologists to be the Orlov diamond (189.9 metric carats), today part of Catherine the Great’s imperial Russian sceptre in the Kremlin.

Hindus were beginning to wonder if the Koh-i-Noor was actually the legendary Syamantaka gem mentioned in the Bhagavad Purana’s tales of Krishna.

‘very meagre and imperfect’

Persian historian Muhammad Kazim Marvi

Mughal emperor Muhammad Shah Rangila could secrete within his turban,

Marvi’s eyewitness account,

the Koh-i-Noor – the Mountain of Light, whose price no-one but God Himself could know!

the Koh-i-Noor was taken from a boy who had lost his kingdom to a colonial power, seized from the Sikh court and passed to the British crown and the Tower of London.

Until the discovery of diamond mines in Brazil in 1725, with the sole exception of a few black diamond crystals found in the mountains of Borneo, all the world’s diamonds came from India.

extracted as natural crystals from the soft sands and gravels of ancient riverbeds.

Garuda Purana,

Koh-i-Noor, and follow it into English literature: the cursed gem.

ratnashastras

Kavi-priya,

Kautilya’s Arthasastra,

‘On Mines and Precious Stones’

Khazainul Futu, or Treasures of Victory, composed for Sultan Alauddin Khalji

Vijayanagara was also the supposed location of the largest diamonds in

India,

Any stone which has a weight over 30 carats belongs to the King.

naife diamond is worth more than a cut one.

The largest I have seen in this land was 140 carats, another 120,

the size of a small hen’s egg.

the Koh-i-Noor, and did the great diamond once grace the throne room of the kings of Vijayanagara before finding its way to Delhi?

Zahir-ud-din Babur,

Delhi sultan Ibrahim Lodhi,

the battle of Panipat;

Babur not only established the Mughal dynasty, which ruled northern India for 330 years, he also wrote one of the most fascinating diaries ever written by a great ruler: the Baburnama.

his son Humayun captured the family of Bikramjit, the raja of Gwalior,

its value at two and half days food for the whole world. Apparently it weighs 8 misqals.’

Babur died in 1530, only four years after his arrival in India,

in 1540, after less than ten years on the throne, Humayun was forced into exile in Persia.

brave and intelligent but unfocused, unambitious and perennially unpunctual son;