A large diamond with a long history, the Koh-i-Noor is famously associated with conquests and the shifting balance of power among rival empires between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries. Said to have been named Koh-i-noor — meaning ‘mountain of light’ in Persian — by Iranian conqueror Nader Shah, the diamond has changed hands many times, usually as a spoil of war. Its owners include the Kakatiya dynasty of South India, the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughals, the Afsharids of present-day Iran, the Durranis of present-day Afghanistan, and maharajas of the Sikh empire, before the British East India Company acquired it. Housed in Britain since 1849 as Crown property, today it is the subject of criticism, international tensions and debates surrounding the colonial appropriation of goods.

Weighing about 190 carats through its early history, the oval diamond in its present form weighs 105.6 carats, and is 3.6 centimetres long, 3.2 centimetres wide and 1.3 centimetres deep.

The diamond’s origin and its history before the seventeenth century are uncertain. According to most modern scholarship, it is thought to have been discovered in the thirteenth century, sifted from alluvial deposits in the Krishna–Godavari river delta in present-day Andhra Pradesh and Telangana in India — the site of the later-established Kollur mines, famous for the Golconda diamonds. This put the stone in the possession of the ruling Kakatiya dynasty until it was, by most accounts, paid as tribute to the Delhi Sultanate when Alauddin Khilji’s forces subjugated the Kakatiyas c.1310. The diamond shifted hands among the various dynasties of the Delhi Sultanate for the next two centuries, including the Khiljis, the Tughlaqs, the Sayyids and the Lodis. When Babur defeated Ibrahim Lodi in the Battle of Panipat in 1526, the diamond passed to him, receiving the epithet ‘Diamond of Babur’, and remained with the emperors of the Mughal dynasty for the next two hundred years. Babur’s account in his memoir Baburnama suggests an alternative provenance for the diamond, stating that it had previously been in possession of the king of Gwalior. According to other accounts, it may have been housed in the kingdom of Malwa before it was taken by the Delhi Sultanate. Weighing roughly 190 carats, the Koh-i-noor was at the time one of the largest diamonds in the world.

In Hindu mythology and popular imagination, the Koh-i-Noor is considered to have a history dating back millennia. The precious stone Syamantaka described in the Bhagavata and Vishnu Puranas as endowing magical powers on its owners — which included the mythical Surya, Satrajita, Krishna and Jambavan — is sometimes interpreted as the Koh-i-Noor. However, these literary narratives are understood in scholarship to conflate several distinct historical gems.

The first verifiable record of the Koh-i-Noor appears in Muhammad Kazim Marvi’s biography of Nader Shah, in which it is described as being embedded in Shah Jahan’s Peacock Throne. In 1628, Shah Jahan commissioned an exceptionally opulent throne as a symbol of his power, featuring the forms of two peacocks. Covered in gold and silver and studded with numerous precious stones including the Koh-i-Noor (then known as the Diamond of Babur), the Akbar Shah Diamond and the Timur Ruby, it served as a symbol of the extravagance, luxury and power that the Mughal empire epitomised at the time. Based on seventeenth-century French jeweller Jean Baptiste Tavernier’s account, it is sometimes theorised that the Koh-i-Noor was cut from the Great Mughal Diamond under Aurangzeb’s rule. However, this theory has generally been discredited in light of recent research.

When Afsharid Persian conqueror Nader Shah invaded Delhi in 1739 he brought the Peacock Throne, among many other Mughal treasures, back to Iran — removing, however, the Koh-i-Noor and the Timur Ruby from the throne to wear on an armband. While the throne was later dismantled for the value of its component materials and gems, the armband with the Koh-i-Noor came into the possession of Ahmad Shah Durrani, who succeeded Nader Shah after the latter’s death in 1747, soon establishing and ruling what is present-day Afghanistan. In 1809, one of his successors, Shah Shujah, fled with the diamond after being overthrown, and was captured by the founder of the Sikh empire Ranjit Singh in Lahore, present-day Pakistan. Having refused to part with the diamond initially, he used it to negotiate his release in 1814. 

In Ranjit Singh’s possession, the Koh-i-Noor’s reputation grew further as a coveted marker of prestige and dominance. He displayed it on the front of his turban or wore it on his arm at important state events or festivals, as a symbol of the territorial power he had reclaimed from the Iranian and Afghan rulers since their siege of Delhi. At all other times, it was kept fiercely guarded. At Ranjit Singh’s death in 1839, his head priest alleged that the king had willed the stone to the Jagannath Temple in Puri, Odisha. However, his treasurer secured it for the successors to the throne, maintaining that it was state property. While the British imperialists also wished to acquire the diamond, it remained with Ranjit Singh’s successors through a tumultuous period in the Sikh empire. In 1843, his youngest son Duleep Singh ascended to the throne at the age of five. In 1849, the British annexed the princely state of Punjab, forcing the ten-year-old Duleep Singh to sign the Last Treaty of Lahore, which required him to surrender his position and hand over the Koh-i-Noor to Britain’s Queen Victoria.