Koh dreamy days4/2/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() Turco-Mongol leader Zahir-ud-din Babur came from Central Asia through the Kyber Pass (located between modern-day Afghanistan and Pakistan) to invade India in 1526, establishing the Islamic Mughal dynasty and a new era of infatuation with gemstones. The world’s oldest texts on gemology also come from India, and they include sophisticated classification systems for different kinds of stones. “In many ancient Indian courts, jewelry rather than clothing was the principle form of adornment and a visible sign of court hierarchy, with strict rules being laid down to establish which rank of courtier could wear which gem in which setting,” Dalrymple and Anand write in their book. Most of the gemstones were alluvial, meaning they could be sifted out of river sands, and rulers of the subcontinent embraced their role as the first diamond connoisseurs. Nader Shah on the Peacock Throne, whose jewels included the Koh-i-Noor diamond.įor centuries, India was the world’s only source of diamonds-all the way until 1725, with the discovery of diamond mines in Brazil. To understand where the diamond came from-and whether it could ever go back-requires diving into the murky past, when India was ruled by outsiders: the Mughals. All the romance, all the blood, all the gore, all the bling.”īut beneath the drama of the diamond is a more serious question that still has no clear answer: How should modern nations deal with a colonial legacy of looting? With numerous countries (including India, Pakistan and the Taliban in Afghanistan) having claimed ownership of the Koh-i-Noor, it’s a topic under vigorous debate. For Dalrymple, “It’s a perfectly scripted Game of Thrones-style epic. And the true history has its share of drama. In their new book Koh-i-Noor: The History of the World’s Most Infamous Diamond, Anand and Dalrymple work their way through more than four centuries of Indian history to learn the truth about the diamond, “panning the old research” like the Indians who sieved river sand for diamonds, Anand says. ![]() “A story which is incredibly important to people, an object known around the world, but which is all built on a structure of myth.” “We found what every historian longs for,” Dalrymple says. But according to historians Anita Anand and William Dalrymple, that geologist got it all wrong. That was when a British amateur geologist interviewed gemologists and historians on the diamond’s origins and wrote the history of the Koh-i-Noor that served as the basis for most future stories of the diamond. The gem, which would come to be known as the Koh-i-Noor Diamond, wove its way through Indian court intrigues before eventually ending up in the British Crown Jewels by the mid-1800s. According to Hindu belief, it was revered by gods like Krishna-even though it seemed to carry a curse, if the luck of its owners was anything to go by. The diamond came from India’s alluvial mines thousands of years ago, sifted from the sand. ![]()
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