'Persia and the Persian Question by the Hon. George Nathaniel Curzon, M.P.' [‎321] (366/714)

TEHERAN
321
jewels. This left two Peacock Thrones to be demolished between
Ins death and the end of the last century, a catastrophe which in
the anarchy and violence of those times would have been in itself
no unlikely occurrence; but it left the Takht-i-Taous unexplained,
as under no circumstances could the latter be described as a dupli
cate of Tavernier's original. Now, however, I came across a
passage in Fraser s ' Ivhorasan' in which he mentions that an old
Kurd told him in 1822, that 'when Nadir Shah was murdered
and his camp plundered, the Peacock Throne and the Tent of
Pearls fell into our hands, and were torn in pieces and divided
on the spot.' Any Kurd might certainly have been trusted to
handle such an object as the Peacock Throne in the unceremonious
manner here described, and, assuming the veracity of this par
ticular Kurd, I witnessed with some delight the disappearance of
the real Peacock Throne, or one of the two, from the scene.
A phrase m Morier's account had now set me thinking that
the Takht-i-Taous at Teheran must be a modern structure after
Deposition a11 - In tlie same passage which I have quoted in a
usurper footnote > ^ adds: ' It (i.e. the throne) is said to have
cost 100,000 tomans 10,000 Persian dinars, or a gold coin of that value. ' (equivalent at the beginning of
the century to about 100,000Z.) ; 1 herein clearly implying that an
account or a tradition of its cost prevailed at Teheran, which was
far more likely to be the case with a new than with an old fabric,
and which was extremely unlikely to have been the case with an
object carried off in plunder from a remote country seventy years
before. At this stage, accordingly, I referred my doubts for solu
tion to Teheran itself, and after an interval of some weeks was
interested and (I may confess) rejoiced to hear, on the authority
of the Grand Vizier and the former Minister for Foreign Affairs, 2
that, as I suspected, the Takht-i-Taous is not an Indian throne at
all. It was constructed by Mohammed Husein Khan, Sadr (or
High Priest) of Isfahan, for Fath Ali Shah when the latter married
an Isfahani young lady, whose popular sobriquet, for some unex
plained reason, was Taous Khanum or the Peacock Lady. The
King is further said to have been so much delighted with the
throne, that it was made a remarkably prominent feature in the
1 I understand, however, that it is now valued at nearly 200,000Z.
When I was in Teheran I had in vain asked the same questions of the
custodian of the treasury, and of every Persian official whom I met, but without
eliciting any satisfactory response.
VOL, I. Y"