Ancient Indian coins

This paper catalogues and analyzes a group of 84 late Mauryan period coins which appeared on the market. Based on their consistent typology, patination, and state of preservation, these coins were likely discovered together as a hoard.

The coins are notable for demonstrating that standard punchmarked karshapanas circulated alongside fractional mashakas during this late period, as the group includes several examples where both types were encrusted together. This is important because the chronology of the fractional mashaka coinage is poorly understood.

Additionally, it is noted that the preservation and typology of these coins is very similar to coins from the Mir Zakah II Hoard, and so it is possible that they might be part of that hoard.

The Panchala kingdom in northern India produced a long series of copper coinage for several centuries. Two new kings have now been discovered through their coins: Rajnyah Bhanumitra and Rajnyah Vijayamitra. The presence of these independent kings - with their royal titles and complex iconography - indicates that Panchala coinage continued well into the Kushan era and there was no long interlude during Kushan rule in northern India. This paper presents the coins of these two Panchala kings and discusses the importance of this discovery.

Punch Mark Coins (PMCs) of Gandhara Janapada rank amongst the earliest, and most ancient, if not THE earliest, coins of India. They are of a peculiar 'bent-bar' shape.

This article traces its origin, shape, weight standard and why it qualifies as a 'coin'.

Swastika is an ancient global symbol found across various civilizations on potteries, vases, ceramics etc. It is used almost exclusively nowadays by the Hindus, Buddhist & Jain communities in India where it has been, and continues to be, a revered symbol since milleniums.

In the West, however, the Swastika evokes negative connotations as a symbol of hate and intolerance due to its identification with the German Nazis & Hitler, who chose to (mis)use the symbol for racial, ethnic and cultural superiority.

This article deals with aspects of symbolism, what it means to use a particular symbol, and traces the Swastika symbol on Indian coins from the most ancient Punch Mark Coins, circa 600-800 BC, to the most recent commemorative coins of Republic India, post independence in 1947.........and everything in between!

At the end of the 3rd Century AD, a new power emerged in North Eastern India to fill the void left by the collapse of the Kushanas.  This new power was the Gupta Dynasty which at its zenith controlled most of North and Central India.  The Gupta Kings struck massive coinage, primarily in Gold, Silver and Lead, to support a vibrant economy.  These coins have become a rich source of data -the inscriptions & legends seen on coins and the iconography, all helps scholars piece together the events that transpired during this golden age of India's rich history. While coins have existed for over two thousand years in India, none have matched the sheer beauty and complexity of design as the coins issued by the kings of Gupta Dynasty from the 4th through 6th century AD.

This book covers the history and the entire Coinage of the Gupta Dynasty from the start in 319 AD to it's end in 543 AD. It also includes the Coinage of the Later Guptas and the related dynasties of Bengal.  The author has illustrated every coin variety in Gold, Copper and Lead as well as a complete range of all known Silver coins with dates struck by the Gupta kings.  The classification is comprehensive and intuitive.
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Starting from the first of the Gupta kings, Chandragupta I in 319 AD, to the last the King Vishnugupta in 543 AD, their coins are a historical record detailing the evolution of the Gupta style and its impact on religious art from this golden age of India. The clues hidden in the coin designs, legends, dates and metrology all speak volumes and have here been deciphered to help reconstruct the history of the dynasty. In this book an attempt has been made to catalogue the entire coinage in gold, silver, lead and copper, listing all known coin types and varieties.

The book provides a detailed analysis of the designs, dates and metrology and an extensive discussion of the history of the Gupta Empire.  The book includes an excellent section on the iconography, metal analysis, history and the evolution of the designs seen on the Gupta gold coins.  It is a quintessential guide for Scholars & Collectors of coins to better understand the relative rarity and the different varieties with a full representation of the coins from Private Collections and most of the major Museums in India and across the world.

The last complete catalogue of the Gupta Dynasty coinage was published by Dr. A.S. Altekar in 1957, and since then no one has been successful in fully cataloging the entire series. This work, published here on the 60th anniversary of Dr. Altekar’s seminal work, is a continuation of that effort to fully document the coinage and to understand its impact on the history of India. It includes the rarest of the coins, published here for the first time, from major Museum collections in India, and around the world as well as private collections, most of which are inaccessible to researchers.

The research, data and analysis provided within, will help scholars to fully understand the complex history and inscriptions, as well as the vast and beautiful coinage of the Gupta Dynasty and will continue to serve as a comprehensive reference on the Gupta Dynasty numismatics.

Mr. Sanjeev Kumar is Chairman of the Shivlee Trust and is an independent researcher and numismatist who has spent an entire lifetime studying the history and coinage of the Gupta Empire. He is considered one of the world's foremost authorities on Gupta Dynasty coinage. This is a culmination of a love affair that sprouted from the mind of a young child growing up in India. The stories of the great Gupta kings and the legendary King Vikramaditya, his exploits and treasures are now fully documented here for everyone to enjoy.



Book Review:
Robert Bracey, Editor, Journal of the Oriental Numismatic Society, British Museum.

"Sanjeev Kumar’s Treasures of the Gupta Empire (TGE) is the first attempt at a comprehensive type catalogue of Gupta coins for fifty years. Implicitly, it is a replacement for Allan and Altekar both in content (with a lot of new material in the last half century) and in terms of organization (also supported by a great deal of new scholarship). There is no doubt about the size of the corpus which Kumar has assembled. Though only a part of the corpus is on display in TGE there are still far more images, of generally higher quality, than previous publications. The more significant question is whether this corpus has allowed Kumar to resolve those problems of classification and attribution, and how much this impacts on the reconstruction of Gupta history more broadly...

...certainly lives up to the implicit promise of the book, not only does it provide new data about the coins themselves but it offers clear historical implications from that data...

So how well does TGE succeed in its objectives? As a comprehensive reference on the gold coinage of the Gupta’s it is no doubt a huge contribution. The enlarged images, relative ease of use, and comprehensive nature, will likely ensure the volume supplants any of its predecessors as the catalogue of choice... overall this is a volume that I would recommend as a standard reference to anyone with an interest in Gupta coinage. "

The Gupta dynasty was an imperial dynasty which ruled Northern India from the fourth to the 6th century. Its domains were built on the firm shoulders of Samudra Gupta (r. 335-375 C.E.), the second Gupta ruler who laid the foundations of a vast empire by conducting an Ashwamedha Yagna, defeating or humbling most North Indian rulers. Samudra Gupta issued a set of gold dinars commemorating his achievement.
Similarly, another set of Ashwamedha dinars were issued by Kumara Gupta I (r. 415-455 C.E.) in another context. This paper looks into the differences between the two coin types and the probable circumstances behind both issues

A presentation on Kushan Coinage and History by Joe Cribb, Robert Bracey and Lauren Morris
Accessible on line from:
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/rec/WN_aDxiMRriTFuoOgZ_WM09ug?meetingId=IPG1GpAT-dxWRMXIj8ZX2VSed1yU2ECe6SHLv4I4JIOXw8XM1T-FJ5cO7LAXRlR2.7iB94Plmtqzdmh1f&playId=&action=play&_x_zm_rtaid=hCfsvtUJTguECvjfh4mz1A.1627128217974.8df0d4862290b7d4758230239bb5646f&_x_zm_rhtaid=358

Chapter 9 from the book is provided here to researchers and scholars for easy reference. This chapter covers the metal analysis of the gold coins of the Kushanas (from the British Museum Collection), the gold & silver coins of the Gupta Kings, as well as the silver coins of the Kshatrapa kings (prior to, and upto their conquest by Kumaragupta I). 

The data provided herein references both the specific gravity analysis done by various scholars in the past, as well as new data based on an extensive XRF spectrographic analysis study for the gold and silver coins of the Gupta kings as well as the silver coins of the Western Kshatrapa kings.

The results shown from the analysis here, totally negate the theories put forth by past scholars and historians that starting with Skandagupta a debasement of the Gupta gold coins occured, caused invariably by invasions by three foreign powers - i.e.,  the Sassanians, the Kushana Śakas and the Hūṇas (Jayaswal 1934:34), a false premise, derived from wrong assumptions, leading to wrong conclusions which are then treated as 'facts' and continue to get repeated and quoted time and again by later scholars.

Ancient Indian Coinage evolved over a long period of nearly two millennia from the sixth century before the Common Era till the twelfth century of the Common Era before the implementation of Indo-Islamic coinages by the Indo-Islamic kingdoms of the region.
During this long period, its minting techniques underwent a sea of change from an indigenous style called Punch-marked technique evolved in the pre-Buddhist and Mauryan era to Greek inspired Die-striking method along with Casting of certain series probably inspired by Chinese coinage. This paper looks at prominent coinages issued majorly during this long period across the Indian sub-continent.

This is an important compilation that brings together all the recent discoveries of ancient Indian coinage with the various series that had so far been documented but scattered across different catalogues and publications.  There are, however, niggling areas where this book could have done better.

Mahabharata is one of the two great Sanskrit epics of Ancient India, the other being Ramayana. The Mahabharata translates as ‘The Great Tale of the Bharata Dynasty’ and is the longest poem ever written being 4 times the length of Ramayana and 10 times the length of the two ancient Greek poems Iliad and Odyssey combined, composed by Homer. The The Mahabharata is an epic legendary narrative of the Kurukṣhetra War between the Kauravas and the Pāṇḍavas. ‘Bhagwad Gita’ is an important component of the Mahabharata. It is believed the Kurukshetra War occurred between 1200 – 800 BC, with some holding the view it occurred much earlier ca 3000 BC or even earlier, while some historians and archaeologists argue this conflict occurred in 1000 BC.

One of the fallouts of the Kurukshetra War was the political re-organization in India and the emergence of 16 Big States (Solasa Mahajanapadasa) few centuries later, of which Magadha became the most prominent and dominant by the time of Buddha ca 600 BC. It was also the time when the economy transitioned from predominantly barter and proto-money to coined money system.

This is the story of India’s first money of how coinage evolved in India from the time of the Mahabharata to the Mahajanapadas.

The dating of sculpture from Gandhāra and its related regions is a dif cult thing. As there are only a handful of sculptures bearing dates, all in unspeci ed eras, any attempts at dating have to rely on a series of understandings, based on archaeological context, material and stylistic analysis, and iconographic development. What is often presumed without comment is the underlying chronological structure which gives such dating a relationship with the eras in use today. This structure has largely been constructed from four sources of evidence: dated inscriptions, numismatic sequences, the scarce references in historical texts, and attempts to match the era used by the Kushans with other Indian eras. Unfortunately the underlying chronological structure built from these has been in a state of  ux since it was  rst attempted. The proposal made in 2001 by Harry Falk that Kaniṣka I’s  rst year was in AD 127, based on the information about the relationship between the Kushan and Śaka eras in an astrological text, the Yavanajātaka by Sphujiddhvaja (Falk 2001), was the  rst to call on a relatively contemporary source with concrete evidence. This proposal has become widely accepted, even though its implications have not yet been fully assimilated into the discourse on Gandhāran art. This date has also not yet been applied to the broader chronological structure, as it comes from a different form of evidence. So parts of the chronological structures are still attached to earlier solutions, based on different resolutions of the evidence. This paper attempts to show that the solution reached by Falk from the astrological text can also be demonstrated by recourse to the use of numismatic and inscriptional evidence, thereby suggesting that Falk’s proposal has important implications for solving the problem of Gandhāran chronology and accordingly that of Gandhāran art too.

An account of the early nineteenth century process of identifying the remains of the Kushan dynasty, through its coins, its inscriptions and references in Chinese and Buddhist texts. Focussing on the contribution of early numismatists, James Tod, Horace Wilson, Charles Masson, James Prinsep and Sir Alexander Cunningham.

This fifth installment of the SCP project catalogue includes coins of two Wei dynasties in China; the Mahakshatrapa, the Gupta Empire and some successors, the Kidarites, two different Alchon Hun states, and the Pallava, in India, Nepal, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Uzbekistan; the Aksumite Empire centered on northern Ethiopia and Eritrea; and the Ostrogoths in Italy and the Vandals in Tunisia. Most of all, there are late Roman and early Romaion (Byzantine) coins, a few billon but mostly bronze or copper: from Egypt, perhaps, and from Turkey, Greece, Serbia, Croatia, Italy, and France; unofficial imitation probably from Israel; and uncertain mint, unknown provenance—all too many coins.

This fourth installment of the catalogue includes coins of post-Satavahana, Kushana, and post-Kushana states and empires in India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan; Chach in Uzbekistan; and the Iranian Empire of the Sasanians in Iraq and a vassal state in Pakistan and either Afghanistan or less likely, Turkmenistan. Most of all, there are Roman coins from the last century of the Principate and the beginning of the Dominate: provincial and civic issues from Egypt, West Bank, Turkey, Bulgaria, and Greece; imperial strikes from Egypt, Turkey, Greece, Croatia, Italy, and Germany; and unofficial issues, one of which was probably from Italy, some from northwestern provinces, and others of unknown provenance.

The recent discovery of a hoard of debased gold coins with the names of four early Kashmir Kings, Tujina, Pravarasena, Meghama and Toramana,  invites a reappraisal of the early coinage of Kashmir, from post-Kushan issues to the beginnings of its medieval coinage. The progression of issues from the late Kushan period until the issues of these four kings presents an anomaly in the previous accounts of early Kashmir coinage, as the sequence created for early Kashmir coinage excludes from the series a group of coins attributed to Kashmir since the late nineteenth century. The excluded coins appear to have been issued in the Punjab and further east. The new hoard also exposes the chronological problems of using the Rajatangini in constructing a chronology for Kashmir before the ninth century.

Abstract:
This reappraisal of the coins of the satraps Kharahostes, son of Arta[sa], and Mujatria, son of Kharahostes, shows that their domain was in the region of Jalalabad in Afghanistan and that they were ruling during the period of the first Kushan king, Kujula Kadphises, and their satrapy ceased issuing coins in the period of the second Kushan king, Wima Takto. The Kharahostes who appears in the Mathura lion capital appears to have been a separate person with no clear connection with the son of Arta[sa]. This interpretation has been reinforced by the recent discovery of a coin of Kharahostes reigning as satrap at Mathura. Both Kharahostes can now be dated in the late first century AD, ruling just before the Kushan conquest of
their domains.

Details of attribution were provided for coins first produced prior to 375 BCE: copper and bronze from China, Turkey, Ukraine, Greece, and Italy; and silver fractions from Pakistan, Turkey, Greece, and Italy. Al marco production of silver fractions seems to have been more common than previously thought, which may have been a factor in the initial acceptance of al marco, fiduciary bronze coinage in the Greek and Hindu worlds. For Greek bronze, size and weight in proportion to denomination—dichalkon is about twice as heavy as chalkous—has been advanced by several numismatists as a key to attributing denomination, though exceptions exist and type (obverse and reverse design) must be considered as well.

The coinage of Trigarta janapada is one of the rarest in the ‘tribal’ series of ancient India. Just one specimen was known for several decades, in the British Museum collection. This paper will add two more types from the author's collection to the corpus of coins of this janapada. I will also attempt to locate its territory and examine the possibility of identifying Trigarta with the Takkadesa of historical texts.

The chronology in this paper should be adjusted to take account of the redating of Kanishka era year 1 to AD 127 (Falk) and Azes era year 1 to 46 or 47 BC, see Cribb 2005 (http://www.academia.edu/3026258/The_Greek_Kingdom_of_Bactria_its_Coinage_and_its_Collapse). Also see Falk and Bennett (http://www.academia.edu/349875/Macedonian_Intercalary_Months_and_the_Era_of_Azes): CB personal message: Since the Azes era autumn-based year 1 is 48/7 while the spring-based is 47/6, the overlap year of 47 is the better approximation; AD 127 is the better approximation for 1 Kanishka for the same reason. Similarly, if 1 Yavana era started in both spring and autumn based 175/4, i.e. the two systems are in the opposite phase to the Azes calendar years, then 175 is the better Julian approximation for year 1 Yavana era.

Small Change for the Poor (SCP) is a catalogue of a collection of several hundred mostly inexpensive coins acquired in trade over the course of several decades. These coins are mostly struck rather than cast coins, mostly copper or one of its alloys. This paper covers the " Ancient Indian " coins already published in the first two installments of the SCP catalogue, but with many revisions thereto, plus a draft for coins from 25 BCE to 200 CE. Though some silver coins of mostly high value are included, the focus is on possible attributions of denomination for the base-metal coins; the last two centuries of period analyzed are remarkable for the proliferation of copper coins of putatively large denomination. Your comments are welcome.

Elephant (Airāvata - Vāhana of Indra Dev), has been found on the ancient Indus valley seals, punch marked coins and tribal coins and much later on Satavahana Coins. Their First appearance of an Elephant on a Satavahana coins arose out of fierce expansionist policies of Satavahana King Satkarni I and that of Kalinga King Kharavela.

Most Motif's on Satvahana Coinage remain same, however the Elephant undergoes a peculiar change. Disappearance & Re- Appearance of Tusker Elephants on coins of Satavahana Kings is not in any form a missed out motif forgotten by the mint masters. There is extensive transition ranging from, Geo-Concentric distribution, polarity change, Extensive losses in war-fare, trade, & then return of a long forgotten royal tradition, occurrence of a insignia on late satavahan coins, all is reflected upon the Satavahana coinage.

This paper highlights discussions by scholars going alongside with the evident changing culture during the entire Satavahana Empire.

Abstract
The gold reliquary with images of the Buddha and associated gods found by Charles Masson in 1834 in Bimaran Stupa no. 2, in Darunta district, west of Jalalabad, has since been used by scholars as a tool for understanding the chronology and influences of Gandharan art and the origins of the Buddha image. The scholarly discussion of the significance of the Bimaran gold reliquary is reviewed in this chapter as a historical process and as a discourse on the relative values of archaeological, numismatic and art- historical evidence. The transformation of application of this evidence since 1992 has created a new understanding of the value of the reliquary in addressing the key questions concerning the early history of the Buddha image, and has moved towards clarification of the significance of the reliquary itself.

This short paper discusses the occurrence of countermarks derived from symbols appearing on the final issues of the Imperial Mauryan coinage. These countermarks offer insight into the economy of the post-Ashoka Mauryan dynasty and suggest that the chronological sequence of the terminal series should be re-evaluated.

The numismatic development of the Karttikeya-Devasena coin type is linked to the political fortunes of the Yaudheyas as they spread out after the decline of the Kushans. This paper proposes a new classification for this series, based on the placement of the legend and the presence of symbols on the reverse.

In the divine pantheon of Hinduism, the goddess Durga occupies a special position as the embodiment of female shakti (cosmic energy), fighting against evil demons. Her most popular depiction is in the Mahishasura Mardini form, where she is shown slaying the demon Mahishasura (half-human, half-buffalo) at her feet. This paper publishes the first numismatic depiction of Durga as Mahishasura Mardini to be discovered. These rare coins were issued by a single ruler in two different types: one in silver and the other in copper.