A monarch who suffered many hours of discouragement, urged his courtiers to devise a motto short enough to be engraved on a ring, which should be suitable alike in prosperity and adversity. After many suggestions had been rejected, his daughter offered an emerald bearing in inscription in Arabic “This, too, will pass” [Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, Little, Brown and Company 1937:509].
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Charles R. Iii McGimsey (1985) studied this question.
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