William Drimple

During the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny, he got in trouble for pocketing gems of various Hindu dignitaries and things and getting sent back to England.

Prior to...

1857, he was commissioned when this diamond first went into British hand to go to the Red Fort, which was then in the 1840s still operational with Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last mogul still in place, and go and talk to the old women in the harem.

So he put together this document, which is the source of many of the legends.

And the legendary history of the Koh-i-Noor goes that it was originally mined in Golconda, which is near Hyderabad, that it was part of the regalia of the Hindu kings called the Kakatiyas, who were from that part of the world, that it was looted by the sultans of Delhi, who lost it eventually to Babur,

the first mogul who then lost it to the Persians.

It then came back again, was reunited with the mogul court.

This is kind of long saga.

In reality, there is no completely certain verified mention of this stone, and certainly none under the name Koh-i-Noor before it is stolen in 1739 by Nadir Shah.

And again, we found the first

extant reference in a previously untranslated persian biography of nadir shah telling the story of the looting of delhi and that uses the word for the first time going north so it's actually quite late it's 1750 the first completely verifiable reference to this but but there it obviously did have a history before then so you

The eye of one of the peacocks.

First of all, before the discovery of the New World Mines in Brazil, first of all, then ultimately South Africa, where the biggest diamonds today come from,

um india was the source of all the diamonds in the world it had a monopoly and it was one of india's great exports i mean we think that the pyramids were probably cut using indian diamond tipped tools and um there was this rich tradition of knowledge about gems in india but there were also a large number of very big diamonds floating around in india we know for example that the great hindu kingdom of vijayanagara had an extraordinary collection of enormous diamonds and

And, you know, these must be diamonds that in all likelihood exist today and have names like the Hope Diamond or the Orlov Diamond you mentioned or the Koh-i-Noor.

But it's very difficult in retrospect to work out which of these diamonds is which and which one went in which direction.

This diamond

in the Mogul tradition was not cut like a modern Ratner's ring, you know, with the very sort of symmetrical cut.

It was left as our medieval ancestors, like their diamonds, as a cabochon.

And the kono has this weird shape.