sians and Persians, who
were eager to avail themselves of so fair an occasion to establish a
footing in India. Such a footing would have been manifestly
incompatible with the peace and security of our dominions in India,
and we were obliged, in self-defence, to give to Shuja the aid which
he had so often before in vain solicited, to enable him to recover
the throne of his very limited number of legal ancestors.[7]

Notes:

1. Nadir Shah was crowned king of Persia in 1736, entered the Panjab,
at the close of 1738, and occupied Delhi in March 1739. Having
perpetrated an awful massacre of the inhabitants, he retired after a
stay of fifty-eight days, He was assassinated in May 1747.

2. Meshed, properly Mashhad ('the place of martyrdom'), is the chief
city of Khurasan. Nadir Shah was killed while encamped there.

3. Ahmad Shah defeated the Marathas in the third great battle of
Panipat, A.D. 1761. He had conquered the Panjab in 1748. He invaded
India five times.

4. In 1773.

5. Ludiana (misspelt 'Ludhiana' in _I.G._, 1908) is named from the
Lodi Afghans, who founded it in 1481. The town is now the
headquarters of the district of the same name under the Panjab
Government. Part of the district lapsed to the British Government in
1836, other parts lapsed during the years 1846 and 1847, and the rest
came from territory already British by rearrangement of jurisdiction.
Hyphasis is the Greek name for the Bias river.

6. The above history of the Kohinur may, I believe, be relied upon. I
received a narrative of it from Shah Zaman, the blind old king
himself, through General Smith, who commanded the troops at Ludiana;
forming a detail of the several revolutions too long and too full of
new names for insertion here. [W. H. S.] The above note is, in the
original edition, misplaced, and appended to two paragraphs of the
text, which have no connexion with the story of the diamond, and
really belong to Chapter 47, to which they have been removed in this
edition.

The author assumes the identity of the Kohinur with the great diamond
found in one of the Golconda mines, and presented by Amir Jumla to
Shah Jahan. The much-disputed history of the Kohinur has been
exhaustively discussed by Valentine Ball (Tavernier's _Travels in
India_: Appendix I (1), 'The Great Mogul's Diamond and the true
History of the Koh-i-nur; and (2) 'Summary History of the Koh-i-
nur'). He has proved that the Kohinur is almost certainly the diamond
given