Diamonds Quotes
Most popular diamonds quotes
![At present it [the Koh-i-Noor diamond] is in fact only the ninetieth biggest diamond in the world. - William Dalrymple quote.](/img/q/68/53868A-at-present-it-the-koh-i-noor-diamond-is-fact-william-dalrymple.png)
At present it [the Koh-i-Noor diamond] is in fact only the ninetieth biggest diamond in the world.
Garcia da Orta is explicit that diamonds were not regarded as the pre-eminent gemstone by the Mughals.
Only a few historians remembered that the Koh-i-Noor, which weighed 190.3 metric carats when it arrived in Britain, had had at least two comparable sisters, the Darya-i-Noor, or Sea of Light, now in Tehran (today estimated at 175 to 195 metric carats), and the Great Mughal Diamond, believed by most modern gemmologists to be the Orlov diamond (189.9 metric carats), today part of Catherine the Great's imperial Russian sceptre in the Kremlin.
Until the discovery of diamond mines in Brazil in 1725, with the sole exception of a seam of black diamond crystals found in the mountains of Borneo, all the world's diamonds came from India.
Ancient Indian diamonds were alluvial: they were not mined so much as sieved and extracted as natural crystals from the soft sands and gravels of ancient riverbeds.
In 1628, at the height of his power, Shah Jahan brought the Mughal love affair with precious stones to its climax when he commissioned the most spectacular jewelled object ever made: the Peacock Throne.
