Henry Ernest Stapleton and the Coin Collection in the Heberden Coin Room in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford: Impact, Importance and Insight

Henry Ernest Stapleton and the Coin Collection in the Heberden Coin Room Henry Ernest Stapleton and the Coin Collection in the Heberden Coin Room, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford: Impact, Importance and Insight Sutapa Sinha The collection of coins issued by the Governors and Sultans of Bengal (1205-1576AD) preserved in the Heberden Coin Room of the Ashmolean Museum was first published by the present author in 2010 in a descriptive manner.1 As we analysed the history of the collection for the above series it became apparent that, unlike the British Museum, whose collection was formed in the 18th and 19th century, the majority of the Ashmolean Museum collection was developed in the 20th century, more specifically after the independence of India in 1947. The new coin cabinet of the Ashmolean Museum was formally opened on 24 October 1922 and was named after Charles Buller Heberden (1849–1921), a classical scholar and Principal of Brasenose College from 1889 until his death. The original coin collection of the Ashmolean Museum, formerly preserved in the Old Bodleian Library, Oxford, was transferred to the newly opened coin room in 1922 (Sinha 2010: 163-64). In 1888, Stanley Lane-Poole published a catalogue of coins of the Bodleian Library, Oxford2 which included only 19 coins in the section ‘Kings of Bengal’. Of these 19, six were from Mr J.B. Elliot’s collection, acquired in 1859, and a single specimen was from the collection of Lady Frere, purchased in 1872. For the remaining twelve coins, no particulars of acquisition are known.3 After the publication of Lane-Poole’s catalogue, two more coins of this series were added to the collection through the gift of Reverend J.C. Murray. In 1911, W.E.M. Campbell donated a single coin of this series to the museum along with coins of other series. Altogether19 coins of Islamic rulers of medieval Bengal were in the custody of the 1 See Sinha 2010. This article is an outcome of the author’s first visit to the Heberden Coin room of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford in July 1998 in connection with her project on the study of coin hoards and finds of the Bengal Sultans. Sinha was selected as UK visiting fellow in 1998 and she is much indebted to the Nehru Trust for Indian Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London for sponsoring her entire trip of four months in the UK. She is especially thankful to Dr Luke Treadwell, the then Curator of the Islamic Coins to provide her a slot of one week to study and photo-document the coin collection of the Bengal Governors and Sultans preserved in the coin room. 2 Lane-Poole (1888: 25) described in short only nineteen coins, no. 573 to 591. In the preface, Lane-Poole mentioned that this Bodleian Library catalogue was intended to be used in connection with the Catalogue of the Department of Coins and Medals of the British Museum, London. 3 Lane-Poole 1888: xi and xiv, under Index of Donations and Purchases, accession details of coin nos. 573- 591 are available. This index was prepared by E.B. Nicholson, Bodley’s librarian. The author also noted this accession detail when she visited the Heberden Coin Room in 1998. Look at the Coins! (Archaeopress 2023): 190–197 Bodleian Library in 1922. Along with the coins of many other series, these were transferred to their permanent location at the newly opened Heberden coin room in 1922. It was to our utter surprise that after opening of the new coin room, not a single specimen of the Bengal Sultan series was acquired by the Museum until 1956 when Dr Henry Ernest Stapleton (1878-1962), a retired officer of the Bengal Education Service, deposited a huge number of coins to the Heberden coin room, intended as a future bequest. At this point, 349 coins of the Governors and Sultans of Bengal, including a few coins of the Delhi Sultans struck at Bengal mints, were added to the Bengal Sultans section of the coin room. After this acquisition, the Heberden coin room bought one coin from Richard Burn in 1962, and one from Lord Minto in 1964. Another 69 coins were purchased from P. Thorburn in 1969. In 1970, Mr R. Friel, Curator of the Shillong cabinet, gifted seven coins to the Museum and in 1989, the most recent addition to the collection of coins of the Bengal Sultans was a bequest of four coins from A.W. Pullan. Further details of the history of the collection of the Bengal Sultan series of coins in the Heberden coin room and its trend of acquisition since the 19th century can be found in the present author’s article (Sinha 2010: 164).4 In 1998, the present author visited the coin room of the Ashmolean Museum in order to study and document the coin collection as part of her project on the coin hoards and finds of the Bengal Sultans preserved in public collections in India and abroad. When she enquired about accession records for this part of the collection, she was provided with a hand-written inventory prepared by H.E. Stapleton himself before he bequeathed his collection to the museum.5 In the present article, she intends to analyse Stapleton’s inventory, which is full of very useful information about the source and provenance of many of the coins in his collection issued by the early Bengal Governors, 4 The author gathered all this accession-related information of the coin collection of the Heberden Coin in July 1998 during her sojourn in Oxford. 5 The photocopy of relevant section “Sultans of Bengal’ of the said inventory was kindly provided to the author by the then Curator of Islamic Coins of the museum, Dr Luke Treadwell. She remains much indebted and thankful to him, otherwise this research would remain incomplete. Henry Ernest Stapleton and the Coin Collection in the Heberden Coin Room Delhi Sultans, Sultans of Bengal, Mughal Emperors, Suri Sultan and Afghan Sultans of Bengal. Here we need to keep in mind that this collection might have been built up during two phases of his posting in Bengal; first as Inspector of the Bengal Education Service till 1915, and after the war as the Professor of Chemistry and Principal of the Presidency College, Calcutta from 1919 to his retirement in 1933. the two coins in question were in the Dacca Museum and gave a reference to their publication in 1910. In the preface, Wright clearly noted that ‘the gold and silver coins (58AV -223 AR) were acquired by the DirectorGeneral of Archaeology in India for the Delhi Museum.’ There is some ambiguity as to how Stapleton got hold of these two gold coins of the Delhi Sultans which had already been catalogued, published and preserved in a public collection. Stapleton also furnished a note below no. 142, a coin of Nasir al-din Mahmud (Wright 219A) which reads as follows: This paper has been prepared in honour of Joe Cribb, Keeper of the Department of Coins and Medals, at the British Museum (2003–2009), an erudite scholar and one of the greatest numismatists of the century, who has always inspired the present author to delve deep into the study of the collection history of coins deposited in public collections in the UK that were developed during the colonial and post-colonial period. It is the present author’s sincere attempt to pay a befitting tribute to Joe. E. Thomas, Initial Coinage of Bengal, p. 29, deduces from the fact that this coin bears the name of the Caliph al-Mustansir (640 AH) that it must be an issue of the first prince of this name, governor of Bengal under Iltutmish. This view finds some support from the close similarity of the design to that of the issues of Yuzbak, governor of Bengal, IMC II. H.E. Stapleton’s Inventory of the Coins of the Governors and Sultans of Bengal Stapleton tried to record as meticulously as possible the provenance of the specimens that he collected for his own collection or for the collection of the coin cabinet of Eastern Bengal and Assam, which he published in 1911. Herein lies the greatest importance of this detailed inventory, which not only mentioned the typology and other numismatic details but also recorded the source and reference meticulously as and where applicable. We have retrieved at least ten place names, pinpointing the findspots of coin hoards or small finds, mostly found in what was then Eastern Bengal, which tend to match coin hoards and finds of the Sultans and governors of Bengal recovered since 1898, which the present author has studied, compiled and published twice (Sinha 2001; Sinha 2017). Stapleton’s inventory can be used as a supplement to the previous research of the coin hoards and finds of the governors and Sultans of Bengal. The section on the ‘Sultans of Bengal’ starts on the fourth page of Stapleton’s inventory and continues for the next 29 legal-size ruled pages until the beginning of the description of coins of the ‘Bahamanis of Kulbarga’. The manuscript of the inventory is written in English with coin legends written in Arabic language and Nashq script as neatly as in a text-book, with a serial number for each and every entry.6 Hence, coins under the section ‘Sultans of Bengal’ start with no. 137 and end with no. 493, including six coins of the Delhi Sultans of the early 13th century which were struck in a Bengal mint in their own names through their deputed Governors in this easterly province. Of those six coins of Delhi, two are of gold. No. 141 is of Sultan Ala al-din Masud (639-44 AH / 1242-46 AD) and no. 142 is of Sulan Nasir al-din Mahmud (644-64 AH / 1246-66 AD). Stapleton wrote ‘Wright 187A (this coin)’ and ‘Wright 219A (this coin)’, respectively, in place of the descriptions of the coins. In the case of no. 140, a silver coin of Jalalat al-din Raziya, Stapleton noted ‘Wright 161c’ on the extreme right of the entry, referring to no. 161c in H.N. Wright’s Catalogue on the Sultans of Delhi (1936) as being of a similar type. But in the case of the two gold coins, nos. 141 and 142, Stapleton did not refer to Wright’s catalogue for a type reference but made it clear that they were the same coins already published by Wright in his catalogue as nos. 187A and 219A.7At the time of publication in 1936, Wright mentioned that No. 139 in the inventory is a silver coin of Rukn al-din Firuz, another Sultan of Delhi (633-34 AH / 1235-36 AD) dated 634 AH and may belong to the Purinda find. Stapleton marks it as such but prefixes it with a question mark. The Purinda find was discovered in 1910 and subsequently found its way to the Provincial Cabinet of Coins in Assam.8 On a cross check of the details of the Purinda find, we discovered 5 silver coins of Rukn al-din Kaikaus and 19 silver coins of Shams al-din Firuz Shah. The earliest dated coin of Kaikaus is of 693 AH with the mint name Lakhnauti. If we have to take this coin (no. 139) of Stapleton’s inventory into account, we have to revise the content analysis of the said coin hoard (Sinha 2017: 183-86) that was based on the Suppl. Shillong. We do not have any scope to doubt Stapleton’s reading of the name of the Sultan ‘Rukn al-din Firuz’, although this 6 For obvious/unavoidable reason, neither reproduction of any page of the inventory nor photograph of any coins mentioned in the text is provided here. 7 Wright 1936: 46 and 58 respectively. Wright in his catalogue mentioned that both of these coins (nos 187A and 219A) are now in Dacca Museum. See also Stapleton 1910: 149. 8 This Purinda find was published in catalogue form in Botham and Friel 1919, henceforth referred as Suppl. Shillong. 191 Sutapa Sinha would make the earliest dated coin in the Purinda find one issued by Delhi Sultan Rukn al-din Firuz dated 634 AH. However, as Stapleton himself put a question mark before the words ‘Purinda find’, a fair doubt remains in this case regarding the provenance of the coin. did these coins, part of the Enayetpur find, enter the collection of Stapleton? When did he collect these coins which were unearthed as a group as treasure trove and deposited in the public collection? From his obituary written by F.H.C. Butler, we came to know that Stapleton’s distinguished career was interrupted by the war and in May 1915 he was commissioned in the Indian Army Reserve and in the following September he took a draft to Mesopotamia to join the 24th Punjabis.11 Butler also mentioned that: The next page of the inventory starts with the coins of Shams al-din Firuz Shah, the Governor of Bengal who consolidated Islamic rule in Bengal in 1300 AD. In addition to Lakhnauti, two new mints came into operation during his reign. Mention of two coins (nos. 144 and 145) found at Mymensingh and one coin from the Enayetpur find (no. 150), are of particular interest. As mentioned earlier, the present author studied and analysed thoroughly all the hoards yielding coins of the Bengal Sultans and allied series unearthed since 1843 from different parts of present political boundary of West Bengal, Bangladesh, Bihar, Jharkhand and Assam, including coins preserved in public collections in India and abroad (Sinha 2017). Therefore, the inclusion of names of a few minor finds or major hoards in Stapleton’s inventory, discovered more than a hundred years ago in Bengal and now preserved in the Heberden coin room, Oxford, certainly deserves special mention. “At the end of 1919, he resumed his career in India, occupying leading positions in education which included the post of Principal of Presidency College, Calcutta, and also that of Special Officer in connection with the opening of Dacca University. He retired from the Indian Education Service in 1933, re-joining his family in Jersey, but returned to India for a spell two years later, to catalogue and advise on the preservation of manuscripts in the library of Hyderabad University.” H.E. Stapleton had a long association with the Indian Education service, especially with Bengal, which of course explains why the larger amount of his coin collection consists of coins of the Islamic rulers of Bengal. But the question of how he collected coins from the Purinda and Enayetpur finds, unearthed in 19091910, and subsequently deposited in, and published as a public collection, namely the Provincial Cabinet of Coin, Assam in 1919, remains unresolved. It is particularly intriguing because Stapleton was usually careful to record the provenance of coins (e.g., Stapleton 1911). The Enayetpur find contains less than ten coins found in 1909 and was published in 1919.9 There are two coins of Shams al-din Firuz Shah, one with the mint name Khittah Lakhnauti dated 713 AH written in words (Arabic), not numerals (Suppl. Shillong XIX/12: 136) and the other one without any mint name or date, probably because the margin is cut off the flan. Stapleton’s coin no.150 can be counted as the third coin of Firuz Shah from the Enayetpur find. Stapleton read the date as (7)1[…] AH (wrtten in Arabic, not numerals) in the margin but does not give a mint name. He ascribed it to Group 2 with a cross mark (X) above the words Al-Imam of the reverse legend. Typologically, this specimen has been compared to coin no. 10 of IMC by the present author (Sinha 2017: 211). There are two coins of Shams al-din Firuz Shah (nos. 144 and 145), which Stapleton recorded as ‘from Mymensingh’. On the next page, there is a single specimen of ‘Muhammad ibn Tughlaq of Delhi’, which Stapleton noted was struck at the Satgaon mint dated 734 A.H. which he also recorded as from the ‘Mymensingh find’, putting the provenance in parentheses below the description of that coin. There are six specimens of Muhammad ibn Tughlaq of Delhi in the inventory, issued from three different mints: Shahr Lakhnauti, Satganu and Sunargaon were all within the jurisdiction of Bengal in the 14th-15th centuries, the mints at Satganu and Sunargaon only coming into operation after 1300 AD. According to Stapleton, all six coins are of same type, (cf. IMC, 54/328) with dates ranging from 727 to 734 A.H. Out of the four coins issued from Sunargaon mint, Stapleton read Shahr(city) prefixed with Sunargaon on the first three as a mint On the same page of the inventory, there is another silver coin of Ghiyath al-din Bahadur Shah (no. 169), which is similar in type to IMC ii, No.148/14,10 as classified by Stapleton himself, and which is also a coin from the Enayetpur find. It has the mint name Lakhnauti with epithet ‘Shahr’ i.e. the city. For the date, only ‘sabamayah’, that is the hundred unit ‘7’is extant, the remaining part of the margin being off the flan. In the Suppl. Shillong, four coins of Bahadur Shah found at Enayetpur in the Mymensingh district of Bangladesh are described. Hence, the question may arise how 9 Botham, A.W. and Friel, R., Supplement to the Catalogue of Provincial Cabinet of Coins, Assam, Allahabad, 1919. Henceforth to be referred as Suppl. Shillong. 10 IMC ii refers to H.N. Wright, Catalogue of the Coins in the Indian Museum, Calcutta, Vol. II, Varanasi, 1972 (reprint). Stapleton must have consulted the first edition of the Catalogue. 11 Obituary of H.E. Stapleton collected from : (https://www. cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-for-thehistory-of-science/article/henry-ernest-stapleton-18781962/ F0753BF5E8190974A3D9ADE6B1392A08) 192 Henry Ernest Stapleton and the Coin Collection in the Heberden Coin Room epithet instead of the more commonly found epithet Hazrat Jalal (the holy seat). Sunargaon is located very close to the present capital city of Dhaka, Bangladesh. However, the coin of Muhammad bin Tughlaq from the Mymensingh find is from the Satgaon mint dated 734 A.H. Satgaon was one of the major port towns and headquarters of southern Bengal in the 14th century. date, style of inscription and the motif engraved above the word Al-Imam on the reverse of this coin. In the last line he wrote in brackets: ‘Murshidabad District find, bought fm Calcutta Mint 4.12.06’. This single line renders several pieces of information: first, that this particular silver coin was found in the Murshidabad district; second, that the Calcutta Mint used to sell coins to the coin collectors; and third, that Stapleton bought this coin from that institution on 4 December 1906 for his personal collection. The present author’s extensive study of coin hoards and finds revealed that not a single hoard or find recovered since 1843 is known in the literature as ‘the Mymensingh find.’ There is one hoard of 317 silver coins which was discovered from the village of Jashodal, Station Kishoreganj, district Mymensingh (presently Kishoreganj district of Bangladesh) which was found by Girish Chandra Aich Roy of Jashodal on 27 December 1897. It was first reported in 1898 in the Proceedings of Asiatic Society of Bengal (Bloch 1898). The hoard has been critically analysed by the present author (Sinha 2001: 169-72; Sinha 2017: 178-183). The circumstances of its discovery and its content were thoroughly reported by T. Bloch (1898): it starts with a coin of Sikandar bin Ilyas Shah, the second independent Sultan of Bengal with a date 764 AH(?). Therefore, it is extremely unlikely that the two coins of Bengal governor Shams al-din Firuz Shah and one coin of Delhi Sultan Muhammad bin Tughlaq,#found at Mymensingh, according to Stapleton, are from the Jashodal hoard (Mymensingh district). It is known that around 1905–1906, a hoard of 85 silver coins was discovered in the district of Moorshidabad, without mention of any particular village (Burn 1907). It was mentioned in the report that ‘Of the total number, 57 coins were in such poor condition that they were returned by Mr. Nelson Wright as useless. The remaining coins may be classified as follows…’ (Burn 1907: 587). As a result, we have a description of the remaining 28 coins, without any mention of their deposition/location. It may be assumed that those coins went into the collection of either the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Calcutta or the coin cabinet of the Indian Museum, Calcutta. There were eleven coins of Shihab al-din Bughda Shah in the Moorshidabad hoard(Sinha 2017: 64-65). This fact leads us to conclude that the coin of Bughda Shah in Stapleton’s collection is the twelfth one, which is presently preserved in the Ashmolean Museum’s coin cabinet. That Stapleton bought this specimen from the Calcutta mint in December 1906 could easily be explained by the return of 57 of the 85 coins of Moorshidabad hoard—considered as useless because of their poor condition, they must have been sent to the Calcutta mint to be melted down. Earlier, in the case of the Cooch Behar Hoard (unearthed in 1863) and Jashodal Hoard (unearthed in 1898), we know that a significant portion of the total number of coins unearthed were sent to the Calcutta mint, either to pay the long pending revenue of princely states or simply for reuse of the noble metal.13 In the case of the Moorshidabad find, the first-hand report by Burn (1907) did not mention specifically the disposal of the fifty-seven coins made to the Calcutta mint but study of Stapleton’s inventory makes that the likely destination. Nels Wright returned 57 coins which were in poor condition. Wright’s purchase from the Mint, and his viewing of this group suggests the rejected 57 coins were sent to the Calcutta mint, partly to sell a few pieces to the collectors and partly to reuse the silver content. The Enayetpur find which Stapleton mentions is from the Mymensingh district. As a consequence, it may be assumed that the three coins described as from Mymensingh are either part of a hoard that was dispersed without being reported and published or part of the Enayetpur find but referred to by a different terminology. As Stapleton did not give the date for any of the coins he acquired in this hand-written inventory, we are in dark regarding the year or tentative time of this discovery from Mymensingh in pre-independence India.12 Although the present author never came across with a published report or published catalogue mentioning a coin hoard or a minor find unearthed directly from the Mymensingh area during the first half of the 20th century, it is true that several treasure troves were found within the territory of Mymensingh district. As Stapleton was very particular about provenance details, the possibility of a separate and small Mymensingh find cannot be ruled out. Coin no. 156 is of Shihab al-din Bughra Shah, the son of Shams al-din Firuz Shah, who struck silver coins in both Lakhnauti in western Bengal and Sunargaon in eastern Bengal. Stapleton wrote a detailed note on the We should point out that Stapleton would not have collected the coin of Bughda Shah if it was in very poor 13 The practice of sending huge number of coins recovered from hoards to Her Majesty’s mint in Calcutta was mentioned by the district authority as a way to pay revenues due from the Princely State of Cooch Behar. Col Haughton mentioned this in his official report on Cooch Behar trove found in 1863 (See Sinha 2017 :47-48). 12 The author would be much indebted to receive any further information regarding discovery or publication reference of this hidden small find from Mymensingh in future. 193 Sutapa Sinha condition. In fact, the description of the coin in the said inventory showed even the last two units of the date, i.e. (7)17, were legible on the margin though the mint name was off the flan. This feature is very common in most of the silver coins of the Bengal governors and Sultans because they are manufactured by the die striking technique. Nevertheless, on the basis of the above analysis, we wonder whether 57 coins of the Moorshidabad hoard can really be considered as ‘useless’ or whether sending a large percentage of old silver coins to the Calcutta Royal Mint had merely become government policy in late 19th and early 20th century India to maintain ample silver supply to the mint to strike their current coinage! This needs further research. The question arises whether these five coins of Mubarak Shah and the two coins of Ilyas Shah are to be included in these 97 coins of the Kastabir Mahalla hoard or not. In all probability, we need to count these 7 coins of ‘Sylhet find’ (alias Kastabir Mahalla hoard) in addition to the 97 coins which were published in the catalogue of the Assam coin cabinet by A.W. Botham and R. Friel (1919). The hoard was unearthed in 1913 and must have been deposited in the nearby Assam coin cabinet no later than 1914. From the obituary written by Butler we know that Stapleton left this country to join the Indian Army service in 1915. We assume that Stapleton collected those seven specimens before this particular hoard was deposited in the museum. According to museum acquisition rules, once an antiquity or any other archaeological artifact has been accessioned in a museum, it cannot be purchased or re-acquired by an individual unless the museum authority takes a decision to distribute or disburse duplicate coins to other museums which involves a long drawn out procedure (see for example, The Treasure Trove Act of 1878 (ACT No. VI of 1878.1) and subsequent amendments). Therefore, it is almost certain that Stapleton collected those seven coins of the Sylhet hoard before the rest of the hoard entered the coin room of the Assam State museum. We know that he started to build up his personal collection of coins as early as in 1906 when he bought one coin of Bughda Shah from the Calcutta mint which belonged to the Moorshidabad find. How did he collect these coins of the Sylhet find or treasure trove? Did Stapleton purchase them from the Government authority before final disposition of the coins of the Sylhet find to the Assam Museum, Shillong? Had he been a decipherer,14 he could have collected a little percentage of the total number coins found from the hoard. In the case of the Jashodal hoard (discussed above), T. Bloch gave a list of the disbursement of the entire hoard of 317 silver coins at the time of his report presented to the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1897-1898, where, apart from five museums who received an average of 22 coins each, the decipherer of the hoard received 15 coins and the remaining 188 silver coins were sent to the Calcutta mint. The first catalogue of coins of Eastern Bengal and Assam was prepared and published by H.E. Stapleton in 1911 which suggests the probability that he might have received or collected a number of coins of the Islamic rulers of medieval India by rendering service as a decipherer of the coins unearthed during his tenure in India. In chronological sequence, the next coins are those of Fakhr al-din Mubarak Shah, the first independent sultan of Eastern Bengal who established his capital in Sunargaon, very close to the modern capital city of Dhaka. Five coins of Fakhr al-din Mubarak Shah (nos. 186-190) are ‘from Sylhet find (1913)’, as Stapleton wrote at the end of the entry for no. 190. All five coins are of the same type and were struck from the same mint of the capital city Sunargaon with a mint epithet Hazrat Jalal (the holy seat). All five coins retain the entire reverse marginal legend and each has a different date on it: AH745, 746, 747, 748 and 750, which means all these specimens of the Sylhet find are in good condition with a nicely preserved margin legend. There are two more coins of the first independent sultan of Bengal, Shams al-din Ilyas Shah, from the same Sylhet find. Stapleton himself put a note ‘An unusually fine specimen’ below no. 195 in his inventory. It is struck from the mint of Firuzabad with the epithet al-balad and dated 754 AH. No. 210 is another specimen of the same sultan Ilyas Shah struck at Shahr-i-Naw (‘the new city’) and is actually referring to the newly established capital city of Firuzabad, identified with Pandua situated in the present Maldah district of West Bengal. Stapleton classified these two coins following the British Museum and Indian Museum Catalogues. The Sylhet find was unearthed in 1913 as Stapleton mentioned. Our database of coin hoards and finds of the Islamic rulers of Bengal reveals that in 1913, a hoard of 97 silver coins was discovered from a village called Kastabir Mahalla in the Sadar sub-division of Sylhet district of undivided Bengal and we have named it the Kastabir Mahalla hoard on the basis of the place name or find spot. The present author has mentioned elsewhere that five coins of Fakhr al-din Mubarak Shah from Kastabir Mahalla hoard are preserved in the coin room of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. (Sinha 2017: 185 & 189) 14 In the case of hoard reporting the word ‘decipherer’ was used by T. Bloch, Edward Thomas, N.K. Bhattasali and others for those who used to decipher the coin legends inscribed in Arabic or Persian (in the case of coins issued by Turko-Afghan rulers and the Mughals), who would submit a first-hand report to the custodian, and the details which would be published mostly in the Proceedings and Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. 194 Henry Ernest Stapleton and the Coin Collection in the Heberden Coin Room Next in the inventory are two silver coins from the Sonakhira find, one of Ghiyath al-din Mahmud Shah (no. 438) and one coin of Barbak ibn Humayun (no. 452). The Sonakhira find was unearthed in 1909 in Sonakhira, a village in the district of Sylhet in undivided Bengal. Six coins were preserved in the Assam coin cabinet and subsequently published in Suppl. Shillong: one is of Nusrat Shah, three are of Mahmud Shah and two are of Barbak al-din Barbak Shah (Sinha 2017: 21415). All three coins of Mahmud Shah bear the same date, 944 AH, without any mint name. They are of two different varieties. According to Stapleton, the coin of Mahmud Shah here is similar to IMC Suppl. 71/221which is probably coin no. XLIX/1 of Botham and Friel’s catalogue (Suppl. Shillong: 174; Sinha 2017: 215). The other coin from the Sonakhira find is of Barbak ibn Humayun, which Stapleton mentions first in this subsection: There is a single coin of Ilyas Shah (no. 207) dated 755 AH issued at Hadrat Jalal Sunargaon. Stapleton mentions that this coin is from Gaur. Our database reveals that there are two hoards/finds, one called the Gaur hoard discovered in 1892, found at Gaur, PS. English Bazar, Malda district. The other is named the Belbari hoard, found at Mauza Belbari and reported in 1904. Content analysis of these two hoards revealed that not a single coin of Ilyas Shah was found in either of these two hoards found from the Gaur region. In 1957, another hoard of 68 silver coins was recovered from the walled city of medieval Gaur (Khatun 1960; Sinha 2001: 199200; Sinha 2017: 69-71) but that cannot be taken into consideration. Therefore, this coin of Ilyas Shah was either a stray finds from Gaur and somehow came into the possession of Stapleton or it was a small find that was never formally published or recorded. Hence, we remain indebted to Stapleton for bringing a new coin find into our notice, maybe one hundred years after its discovery. ‘The three following coins, bearing the name Barbak b. Humayun, and the date A.H. 949, suggest that Barbak led a revolt against the rule of Sher Shah which from 946 onwards was enforced by Governors and local chiefs.’ After this coin of Ilyas Shah from the Gaur find, Stapleton remains silent in his inventory regarding the provenance of the coins in his collection till we come to the section about Rukn al-din Barbak Shah, the second monarch of the later Ilyas Shahi period who ruled almost one hundred years after Shams al-din Ilyas Shah. Stapleton notes that no. 333 is a coin of Barbak Shah from the Bashail find as is no.334, which belongs to Shams al-din Yusuf Shah, third ruler of the dynasty. Bashail is a village under Karimganj subdivision of district Sylhet and the find was unearthed around 1917 and published in Suppl. Shillong in 1919. The present author analysed the Bashail hoard first in 2001 and after she visited the Ashmolean Museum, revised her analysis in 2017 (Sinha 2001:184-85; Sinha 2017: 19597). How did Stapleton collect these two specimens belonging to a find that was discovered when he was far away from Indian territory? In fact, he resumed his duty in Indian Education Service in 1919 as the Principal of the Presidency College, Calcutta. In this case Stapleton cannot be the decipherer of Bashail find as we presumed in the case of the Kastabir Mahalla (alias Sylhet) hoard. Was there an organized agency that used to collect coins from the villagers who chanced upon these finds before the administrative authority’s intervention? Did they sell those coins to avid collectors? Is it matter of luck that Stapleton took care to record the findspot? Another possibility could be that Stapleton collected these two coins in 1930 when Mr R. Friel, then a member of the Shillong Coin Cabinet, distributed some 168 duplicate coins from the cabinet (Sinha 2017: 196) The coin room of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge received one coin each of Barbak Shah and Yusuf Shah along with five other silver coins through the initiative of Mr. Friel, documents of which have been published elsewhere by the present author (Sinha 2013: 148-50). Below this note, the description of no. 452 starts and ends with ‘Assam Cat. Suppl. (1919) 160/24. from Sonakhira find’ which supports our assumption that Stapleton directly collected a number of coins from the collection of the Assam coin cabinet which once served as the repository for finds in Eastern Bengal. So far as the obverse and reverse legend of this particular coin is concerned, Stapleton wrote down the entire legend in Arabic: the obverse reads Barbak al-dunya wal din/ abu’l Muzaffar Barbak/ Shah al- Sultan bin while the reverse reads Humayun Shah Khallada/ Allah mulkahu wa Sultanuhu/ 949. Identification of Barbak al-din Barbak Shah (as we prefer to ascribe) is still in doubt as he claimed to be the son of Humayun Shah. There are three coins of the Mughal Emperor Humayun in Stapleton’s inventory. No. 446 (which is similar to no. 444) is from the Raipara find. Two coins of Islam Shah dated 952 are also from the Raipara find (nos. 456-57). As part of the present author’s coin hoard project, it is known that this find was discovered on 6th March 1928 and reported in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1929 (Stapleton 1929).15 A detailed description of the findspot is given in that publication along with the circumstances of discovery and has been critically analysed by the present author previously (Sinha 2001: 190-92). Out of the 182 silver coins in the Raipara hoard, 77 coins belong to Husain Shahi Sultans of Bengal, the remaining 105 coins were of Sher Shah and his son Islam Shah – not a single coin of Humayun was included in the report. But in the 1929 report of the hoard, only 15 195 (JASB, NS, vol. XXV, 1929, no. 2, Calcutta. Sutapa Sinha 1/8th of the total coins in the pot could be recovered and therefore it may easily be assumed that there was more than 1400 coins altogether. This truncated find could well have coins of Humayun and of many other rulers which will remain in obscurity forever. the local administration used to intervene and seize the entire find and hand it over to the respective institution or museum. In early 20th century, a few hoards were broken up and partially dispersed among the local people before the authorities intervened. We also find a number of examples of official dispersion of hoards after they were deposited in the museums. In cases where acquisition would bring many duplicate coins of the same type into one single repository, the authorities used to prepare a list of duplicate coins and distribute it among the other museums in British India (including Burma) and also to the major museums or repository in Britain as per their requirement. The author came across such a disbursement letter sent to the Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge from the Curator of the Assam Coin cabinet, Shillong, along with a list of duplicate coins. Stapleton’s inventory exposed the fact that an individual government official could acquire duplicate coins distributed by the Museum authority. Today, we generally have the notion that after a coin or an antique has been officially acquired for a public collection, it can never move to a private collector. If it moves location it would be either a loan for a limited period or in exchange for other objects. Last but not least are two coins of Islam Shah (nos. 459-460) and one coin of Afghan ruler Ghiyath al-din Bahadur II (no. 461) which were found ‘from vicinity of Bairhatta, Dist. Dinajpur’ and ‘from Mehdiganj, near s. wall of Gaur’, respectively. Bairhatta is very close to the famous historic site of Bangarh in present-day south Dinajpur district of West Bengal, whereas Mehdiganj is popularly known as Mahadipur and situated in the IndoBangladesh border area just outside the southern city wall of Gaur, district Malda, West Bengal. Importantly, there is no other reference known to the present author of any such coin find recovered from these two places. Maybe they were stray finds, and therefore no formal report was published either on Bairhatta or on Mehdiganj. On the whole, the detailed inventory prepared by H.E. Stapleton on the coins he collected throughout his service career in India, especially in Bengal, is a rich storehouse of information, not only providing significant information on the collection history of those coins but also projecting an insight on the trend of recovery of coin hoards and minor finds, policy of their deposition in and distribution from the museums and other institutions like the Asiatic Society of Bengal and Her Majesty’s mint in Calcutta. A part of Stapleton’s personal collection of the coins which have been thoroughly analysed in the present article are directly connected with a number of hoards and small stray finds unearthed in the late 19th and early 20th century in undivided Bengal. This is probably because of his involvement in reading coin legends predominantly written in Arabic, and in the arrangement of the coin cabinets according to their typological classification and publishing museum catalogues as early as in 1911. There were very few scholars at that point of time who could decipher coins of the Bengal Sultans who ruled between the 13th to 16th centuries. Stapleton purchased one coin of the Bengal Sultan from the Calcutta Mint in 1906 which was recovered from the Moorshidabad hoard that was partially deposited in the mint. Earlier, in connection with the Cooch Behar treasure, it was reported by the Indologist Rajendra Lala Mitra that he selected around 1000 silver coins for a private collector Colonel C.S. Guthrie who purchased those coins from the Calcutta Mint in 1863/64 and some of those coins were subsequently sold to the British Museum in 1866. Not all coins deposited in the mint were sold or melted down - some specimens were preserved and published in catalogues. At the beginning of the 20th century, the same practice of officially selling good specimens discovered in hoards to British Officers was in vogue in Her Majesty’s mint in Calcutta. A catalogue of the coins in the bequest of Henry E. Stapleton, incorporating the details of its collection history, either in its own right, or as part of a comprehensive catalogue of the Islamic coins in the Heberden Coin Room would be a very welcome publication. Collecting coins of different series of Indian coinage along with other archaeological artefacts and antiquities became quite typical for many of the British officers and educationists posted in the Indian sub-continent since late 18th century and H.E. Stapleton was no exception. An objective analysis of this partial inventory of 349 coins of the Governors and Sultans of medieval Bengal has brought to light new information on the fluidity of the collection and accession of the coins in early 20thcentury British India. From earlier in-depth research on coin hoards, it was known that after a chance discovery of a hoard, mostly by an individual or a group of people, Acknowledgements The author is sincerely thankful to her then employer Dr Gautam Sengupta (1996-2006) for granting the necessary permission and study leave, and to her colleagues of the Centre for Archaeological Studies and Training, Eastern India, Kolkata for their kind cooperation. She remains ever grateful to her late mentor 196 Henry Ernest Stapleton and the Coin Collection in the Heberden Coin Room Mr Pratip Kumar Mitra for his unstinted guidance and academic suggestions. She remains extremely thankful to Mr Joe Cribb for selecting her as Hirayama Trainee Curator at the Department of Coins and Medals of the British Museum in 1999 which provided her with the opportunity to broaden the spectrum of her numismatic research area and enabled her to make subsequent visits to the Ashmolean Museum and other museums in UK. She is also thankful to other esteemed colleagues of that Department, namely Drs Elizabeth Errington, Vesta Curtis, Venetia Porter, Helen Wang, Robert Bracey and many others who not only provided her with all kinds of academic and official support to complete her tenure as a Trainee Curator but also made her sojourn in London most memorable and enjoyable. At the final stage of completing this article, her sincere thanks go to Mr. Subir Sarkar and Ms. Subhasree Banik of Kolkata. Lane-Poole, S. 1885. The Coins of the Muhammadan States of India in the British Museum, Reginald Stuart Poole (ed.), London: British Museum Press. Lane-Poole, S. 1888. Catalogue of the Mohammedan Coins Preserved in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sinha, S. 2001. Coin Hoards of the Bengal Sultans: An Anatomy of the Hoards. Pratna Samiksha (Journal of the Directorate of Archaeology and Museums, West Bengal), 6-8: 36- 242. Sinha, S. 2010. The Coin Collection of the Bengal Sultans in the Cabinet of Heberden Coin Room, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, Pratna Samiksha: A Journal of Archaeology, New Series, 1:163-175. Sinha S. 2017.Coin Hoards of the Bengal Sultans: 1205-1576 AD from West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand, Assam and Bangladesh. Gurgaon: Shubhi Publications. Sinha, S. 2019. Hitherto Unnoticed Coin Collections of the Bengal Sultans in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge and National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, UK, in S. Basu Majumdar and S.K. Bose (eds) Money and Money Matters in Pre-Modern South Asia: 135-160.New Delhi: Manohar. Stapleton, H.E. 1910. Contributions to the History and Ethnology of North-Eastern India. I, Journal and Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, vol. VI, no. 4: 141-166, esp. 149. Stapleton, H.E. 1929. A Find of 182 Silver Coins of the Husaini and Suri Dynasties from Raipara, Thana Dohar, District Dacca, Eastern Bengal, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal XXV, Numismatic Supplement XLII: 5-22. Stapleton, H.E. 1911. Catalogue of the Provincial Cabinet of Coins, East Bengal and Assam. Shillong: East Bengal and Assam Government. Wright, H.N. 1907-1908. Catalogue of the Coins in the Indian Museum, Calcutta, Vol. 2. Varanasi, 1972 (Reprint). References Bloch, T. 1898. Report on 317 Old Silver Coins Forwarded by Collector of Mymensingh. Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, June 1898, Philological Secretary – Report on Coins, XII: 169-173. Botham, A.W. and Friel, R. 1919. Supplement to the Catalogue of Provincial Cabinet of Coins, Assam. Allahabad: Government Press. Botham, A.W. 1930.Catalogue of the Provincial Coin Cabinet, Assam, 2nd ed. Allahabad, Government Press. Burn, R. 1907. Pathan and Bengal Coins, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, New Series, 8: 587-588. Khatun, M. 1960. On Some New Coins of Alaud-din Firuz Shah and Ghiyathud-din Mahmud Shah of Bengal, Journal of the Numismatic Society of India XXII-216. Varanasi. 197