Koh-i-Noor
one of the largest cut diamonds in the world, now part of the British Crown Jewels
The Koh-i-Noor ( KOH-in-OOR) is one of the largest cut diamonds in the world, weighing 105.6 carats (21.12 g). It is currently set in the Crown of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.
There are multiple conflicting legends on the origin of the diamond, but many Victorian commentators identified it with a diamond said to have originated in the Kollur Mine in India. According to the colonial administrator Theo Metcalfe, there is "very meagre and imperfect" evidence of the early history of the Koh-i-Noor before the 1740s. There is no record of its original weight, but the earliest attested weight is 186 old carats (191 metric carats or 38.2 g). The first verifiable record of the diamond comes from a history by Muhammad Kazim Marvi of the 1740s invasion of Northern India by Afsharid Iran under Nader Shah. Marvi notes the Koh-i-Noor as one of many stones on the Mughal Peacock Throne that Nader looted from Delhi.
The diamond then changed hands between various empires in south and west Asia, until being given to Queen Victoria after the Second Anglo-Sikh War and the British East India Company's annexation of the Punjab in 1849, during the reign of the then-11-year-old Maharaja of the Sikh Empire, Duleep Singh. The young king ruled under the shadow of the Company ally Gulab Singh, the first Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir, who had previously possessed the stone.
In 1851, it went on display at the Great Exhibition in London, but the lackluster cut failed to impress viewers.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q212797. VIAF identifies the subject as 196015407. The Library of Congress control number is sh85072795. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1849 and 1851.
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This entry incorporates text from “Koh-i-Noor” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.