We may reasonably doubt how much of free will there was in the gift from a defeated Hindoo prince to his Afghan conqueror. Let us question this as we may, there is little doubt as to what diamond it was, although Baber gives it no name. The Sultan Ala-ed-din, to whom the imperial memoir-writer here refers, flourished a couple of centuries previously, and it is generally believed that he obtained "the famous diamond" in 1304 when he conquered the Rajah of Malwa in whose family it had been for ages.
KOH-I-NUR, INDIAN CUT.
(186 carats.)
How it eventually came into the hands of Bikermajet is not explained. But in the wild whirl of revolution and insurrection, which form the main staple of Indian history, many things get hopelessly mixed, and a diamond might easily turn up unexpectedly and be quite unable to account for itself. Baber goes on to relate that the great diamond—we will antedate its name by two centuries and call it henceforward the Koh-i-nûr—was valued by a competent judge of diamonds "at half the daily expenditure of the whole world"—an expression which for grandiloquent vagueness can scarcely be surpassed. Fortunately the same competent judge had not the weighing of the stone, or we should be befogged by some further Oriental hyperbole.
The emperor however says distinctly that the diamond weighed about eight mishkals, which being interpreted means about one hundred and eighty-six carats of our weight, or a little less than the Orloff and fifty carats more than the Regent. It is mainly on the evidence of the weight thus carefully recorded by Baber, that we identify the Koh-i-nûr, and can trace its subsequent career. On its arrival in England its exact weight was found to be one hundred and eighty-six and one-sixteenth carats, which agrees with the figure given by Baber as afterwards computed by dependable authorities. When we consider the extreme rarity of these great diamonds, coupled with the fact that no two stones are of exactly the same weight, we may feel pretty safe in concluding that Baber's "famous diamond" and our Koh-i nûr are one and the same stone, especially as henceforward its history is tolerably consecutive.
This magnificent gem the emperor gave to his beloved son Humayûn, who had very dutifully offered it to his father as tribute. It is somewhat painful to learn that Humayûn rewarded this generosity by base ingratitude. The very next year we find Baber making this complaint: