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

by William Dalrymple

The Mughals brought with them from Central Asia a very different set of ideas about gemstones to those then held in India. These ideas derived from the philosophy, aesthetics and literature of the Persian world. Here it was not diamonds but ‘red stones of light’ that were given pre-eminence.10 In Persian literature such stones were prized as symbols of the divine in metaphysics and of the highest reaches of the sublime in art, evoking the light of dusk – shafaq – that fills the sky immediately after the sun has set. As Ferdowsi writes in his great Shah-Nama, or Book of Kings: When the sun gave the world the colour of the spinel, Dark night set foot on the celestial vault.11 Garcia da Orto is explicit that diamonds were not regarded as the pre-eminent gemstone by the Mughals – something which came as an enormous surprise to Europeans. In his Colloquies, da Orto has his interlocutor, Dr Ruano, remark that diamonds ‘are the king of stones, for it has eminence over pearls and emeralds and rubies, if we believe Pliny’. Da Orto, however, corrects him: ‘In this country… they think more of an emerald or of a ruby, which have more value if they are perfect, and size for size, than of a diamond. But as they do not find other stones when perfect and of good water so large as diamonds, it happens that they often fetch a higher price. The value of the stones is no more than the will of buyers and the need for them.’