The mountain of light passed through Mughal, Persian, Afghan and Sikh hands
The Koh-i-Noor weighs 105.6 carats and sits in a crown at the Tower of London, but its path there crossed four empires. Its early history is murky, its name may have come from a traded turban, and four nations still claim it, while Britain maintains it was acquired lawfully.
Much of the famous backstory is legend. Victorian writers linked the stone to India's Kollur Mine and to diamonds owned by Alauddin Khalji in 1310 and by the Mughal emperor Babur, whose memoirs valued one gem at two and a half days' food for the whole world. The historian William Dalrymple notes that India then held several large diamonds, so those identifications are uncertain, and most modern scholars match another candidate, the Great Mogul Diamond, with the Orlov instead. The British administrator Theo Metcalfe judged the evidence before the 1740s very thin.
The first undisputed record comes from Muhammad Kazim Marvi, biographer of the Persian ruler Nader Shah, who describes the diamond set in the Mughal Peacock Throne that Nader carried off after invading India in 1738. Metcalfe later repeated a story that the emperor Muhammad Shah hid it in his turban, and that Nader, proposing a friendly swap of headgear, walked away with it and named it mountain of light. No contemporary account confirms this.
After Nader's assassination in 1747 the gem reached his general Ahmad Shah, founder of Afghanistan's Durrani Empire. His grandson Shah Shuja wore it in a bracelet in 1808, then lost his throne and fled to Lahore, where the Sikh ruler Ranjit Singh took it in 1813. When the East India Company annexed the Punjab in 1849, during the reign of the 11-year-old Maharaja Duleep Singh, the stone was surrendered to Queen Victoria.
Shown at London's Great Exhibition of 1851, its dull cut disappointed crowds, so Prince Albert had it recut as an oval brilliant; its broad base can look like a dark hole when viewed straight on. Only royal women have worn it, reflecting a belief that it brings men bad luck. India, Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan have all demanded its return since 1947.
Source: Koh-i-Noor
