Rare Mughal era eyeglasses up for sale

LONDON

A pair of rare diamond and emerald spectacles from an unknown Indian princely treasury will be sold at an auction in London later this month.

The lenses were placed in the Mughal-era frames around 1890, according to auction house Sotheby’s.

The spectacles will be offered at auction for $2 million - $3.4 million each, the auction house said.

Ahead of the sale, they will be exhibited in October for the first time in Hong Kong and London.

It is unclear who commissioned these spectacles, but they possibly belong to Mughals, a Muslim dynasty of Turkic-Mongol origin that ruled most of northern India from the early 16th to the mid-18th century.

A statement by Sotheby’s said that a diamond and an emerald were shaped into the two spectacles.

The diamond lenses, cleaved as a pair from a single natural diamond, are thought to be from the mines of Golconda in southern India. The teardrop-shaped emeralds originate from a single natural Colombian emerald.

“The quality and purity of the gemstones is extraordinary and stones of this size would no doubt have been the reserve of an emperor,” Sotheby’s said.