THE world’s deadliest diamond!
Eyeballs gouged out, limbs ripped off, men tortured with molten lead — all because of the curse of the Koh-i-Noor. Is it any wonder the Queen chooses never to wear ...
BOOK OF THE WEEK KOH-I-NOOR: THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD’S MOST INFAMOUS DIAMOND by William Dalrymple and Anita Anand (Bloomsbury £16.99)
ThE Koh-i-noor diamond, which weighs 105 carats (or 21 grams), currently resides in the Queen Consort’s crown, kept under guard in the Tower of London.
The Queen Mother wore it to State Openings of Parliament during the reign of George VI, and its last public outing was upon the cushion on the coffin at her state funeral in 2002.
Its next wearer is likely to be ‘Queen’ Camilla at the coronation of King Charles III. If the Duchess of Cornwall reads this book about its history, however, she may start to have misgivings.
‘ The gem rained misfortune on unworthy mortal custodians,’ we are told by William Dalrymple and Anita Anand.
On the very day it arrived in London in 1850, Queen Victoria was hit on the head by a would-be assassin and former prime minister Robert Peel was thrown from his horse — an accident that killed him.
The Koh-i-noor, with its ‘short but irregular crystal tails’, got its name (meaning ‘mountain of light’) from its resemblance to ‘declivities falling from a himalayan snow-peak’.
Indian diamonds are alluvial, sieved and extracted as natural crystals from the sand and gravel of riverbeds.
Quite where the Koh-i-noor came from nobody knows — it may have been the eye of an idol in a temple in southern India, stolen by marauding Turks. But we do know it was at the centre of centuries of bloody conquests as it bounced bewilderingly between rulers and despots.
BY 500BC in Asia, diamonds were fashioned into rings — ‘gods were supposed to dwell in a particle of diamond’ — and in the Indian royal courts, jewellery rather than clothing was the principal form of adornment. Princes and their concubines were covered in ‘a fabulous profusion of jewelled ornaments’ as a conspicuous display of power.
Dalrymple and Anand first find a mention of the Koh-i-noor in 1547. It next turns up in the despatch of a British ambassador in 1616, who described the Mughal emperors as ‘ laden with diamonds, rubies, pearls’.
Shah Jahan, builder of the Taj Mahal, acquired the jewel in 1656, and believed it made him ‘a sun king, almost a sun god’.
At the Red Fort in Agra he commissioned the Peacock Throne, ‘designed to resemble and evoke the fabled throne of Solomon’, which had a canopy studded with gems and held aloft on a column of emeralds. The Koh-inoor was set in the peacock’s crown and was guarded by eunuchs.
Jahan was imprisoned by his sons and died in captivity. his successors were variously murdered — one of them was first blinded with a hot needle, the father of another ruler was ‘forced off a precipice on his elephant’ and wives and mothers were strangled.
Delhi was then invaded by Persians and, in 1739, the populace put to the sword. ‘It seemed as if it were raining blood, for the drains were streaming with it,’ ran a report.
nader Shah, the scourge of the Ottoman Empire, transported the Mughal treasury to Tehran in a caravan consisting of 700 elephants, 4,000 camels and 12,000 horses. he’d received the Koh-i-noor from the defeated Mughal emperor, Mohammud Shah, who wore it in his turban.
nader Shah was the kind of despot who