360 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1960 



the great gems is the Regent or Pitt diamond, originally a rough 

 stone of 410 carats which was cut down to 136 carats in polishing. 

 It was bought by Pitt, the Governor of Fort St. George, in Madras, 

 for £20,000. He sold it to the Regent of France for £135,000. It 

 disappeared during the French Revolution, was returned, was used 

 as security for loans from Holland, and finally Napoleon had it 

 mounted on the hilt of his sword. It is now in the Louvre in Paris. 



The Orloff of 195 carats, a rose-colored diamond, is also well known. 

 It was stolen by a French soldier from a Brahmin idol and was 

 bought by Prince Orloff for £90,000 and is now in the Russian 

 Treasury. 



The Shah of Persia (85 carats) is another great Eastern gem and 

 is unique in having Arabic inscriptions on three of its faces. At one 

 time it belonged to Shah Jehan who, it will be remembered, built 

 the Taj Mahal. His son's name is inscribed on the face of the dia- 

 mond and two of the other owners also had their names engraved on 

 the diamond: a truly prodigious feat of the lapidary. Our knowl- 

 edge of the history of many of these jewels is due to Ta vernier, who 

 was bom in France at the start of the 17th century. He was a jewel 

 merchant who traveled extensively in the East and who made careful 

 observation of the great diamonds which were known at that time. 

 One of the gems which he brought back to Europe on his return was 

 the Blue Ta vernier. This stone was sold to the King of France; it 

 was later cut up and the Hope diamond forms a part of it. A great 

 deal of ill fortune has attended the owners of the Hope diamond and 

 a tradition of superstition has grown up around the stone. It is now 

 owned by Mr. Harry Winston, an American who is not superstitious." 



Probably the gi'eatest jewel which Tavernier saw on his travels 

 was the Great Mogul (260 carats), which at that time was in the 

 treasury of Aurangzeb, the last of the really strong Mogul emperors 

 of India in 1665. By treacheiy this jewel came into the possession 

 of Shah Jehan, whose son Aurangzeb overthrew his father and con- 

 fined him to prison : he was captive at the time of Tavernier's visit 

 and died soon after. With the death of Aurangzeb, the diamond dis- 

 appeared and what happened to it is not known for certain. It was 

 probably cut into two parts, one of which became the Koh-i-noor 

 (meaning "the mountain of light") and under this name returned to 

 India in the 19th century and was owned by Ranjit Singh, ruler of 

 the Punjab. If the Koh-i-noor is indeed the Great Mogul, then 83 

 carats were lost in the 200 years of its disappearance. One of its 

 owners in the interval had perhaps impoverished himself in time of 



•Editor's Notk. — In 1958 the Hope diamond was presented by Mr. Winston to the 

 Smithsonian Institution, where It Is displayed to the public In the Institution's Museum 

 of Natural History. 



