BP-2026.002.1
Hope Diamond
- Claim
- 5 of 5
Irreversible harm to the body, to a life, or to its continuation. - Evidence
- 2 of 5
One retelling, publication or sale listing. - Provenance
- 3 of 3
An unbroken chain to the event it is named for.
These three figures are kept separate and are never combined into a single score. How grave the claim is, what it rests on, and whether the object can be traced are different questions. How the register reads them.
Asserted
Accounts attributed to a source. The register does not adopt them.
That it caused a death in the household of its owner. Successive owners are said to have been beheaded, ruined, driven to madness or killed. The best-known sequence concerns an American owner whose son died in a road accident, whose daughter died of an overdose, and whose husband was declared insane and died in a psychiatric hospital. The stone is said to have been taken from the eye of a Hindu idol and cursed by a priest, and the misfortune is said to pass with ownership.
- C16
conflict between persons
- C19
financial ruin
- C20
accident or injury
- C22
mental disturbance
- C27
death
- P13
light phenomenon
- T1
passes with ownership
- H9
subject of a ritual or curse
index v0.8: Subject of a ritual, curse or blessing
- H18
taken from a protected or sacred site
- H19
unlawfully obtained
- H21
associated with a named legend or figure
reported by: six identifiable people since 1909
Recorded
Established by the register, or received with the object.
File
- Register number
- BP-2026.002.1
- Entry type
- Object entry
- Opened
- 2026-09-16
- Coded against
- Claim Index v0.8
Object
- Type
- cut gemstone, blue diamond, 45.52 carats
- Materials
- diamond, platinum, diamonds (mount)
- Date
- recut 1812 from a stone acquired in India in the seventeenth century
- Origin
- India, France, United States
- Whereabouts
- held by an institution, Washington, D.C
Custody
| Period | Holder | Transfer | Source | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1668 | Louis XIV of France, from Jean-Baptiste Tavernier | Sale | Smithsonian Institution, published account | II |
| 1792 | — | Theft | Smithsonian Institution, published account | II |
| 1792–1812 | No record | |||
| 1812 | in England, recut | Unknown | Smithsonian Institution, published account Identified with the stone stolen in 1792 by later research, not by a recorded transfer. | II |
| 1830 | Henry Philip Hope | Sale | Smithsonian Institution, published account | II |
| 1901 | left the Hope family | Sale | Smithsonian Institution, published account | II |
| 1901–1958 | Not yet entered | |||
| 1958 | Smithsonian Institution, presented by Harry Winston | Gift | Smithsonian Institution, published account | II |
On what grounds
Published retellings. Reported by six identifiable people since 1909. Evidence is capped at 2: the claim first appears in a sale setting. The deaths themselves are well recorded; what is not recorded anywhere is that the stone had any part in them.
Counter-indications
What weighs against the claim. These are never subtracted from a figure; the lowest applicable ceiling is applied instead.
- CI1
absent from the earliest sources
- CI6
the motif of a gem stolen from an idol recurs across unrelated objects and appears in nineteenth-century fiction
- CI9
the claim first appears in a sale setting
- CI23
the seller had a commercial interest in it
- CI20
all claims about earlier owners trace back to a single reporter
Register findings
- MT7
price record on file
- MT21
assigned keeper
- MT26
exhibited publicly
- MT28
has appeared in film and broadcast
- MT29
catalogued by another register
Note. The red phosphorescence the stone shows after exposure to ultraviolet light is sometimes offered in support of the claim. All blue diamonds phosphoresce; the effect is caused by boron.