New fun, wacky Indo-Sassanian

To the best of my knowledge almost all Sasanid drachm issues fall pretty randomly in the 89% to 99% purity range, and its hard to say if any of that implies intentional debasement. My guess is that the approach to refining silver was highly repetitive - a sort of Newton-Raphson thing. So the stuff at 89% may well have been the product of laziness or incompetence rather than debasement. For the guy in the street I suspect they were all thought of as "pure silver".

Having said that, there are reports of specific incidents of debasement under Shapur I and Peroz - the latter to do with his "hungeld" problem quite likely. Am a bit dubious about your guess though, as the vast bulk of surviving coin is from K I, H IV and especially K II, and all that seems to be to the higher standard. But who knows?

Rob T

 

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When it comes to Gadhaiya Paisa, I fall in with "most collectors" as @dougsmit described : "satisfied with owning exactly one and ignoring the considerable variety and multitude of questions they raise". Maybe too modern for "Ancient". That said, I do like the "one" with his expressive face:


Chalukyas of Gujarat
Anonymous Silver Drachm (Gadhaiya Paisa)
Obv: Degenerate Indo-Sasanian style bust right, sun and moon (crown?) above
Rev: Stylized fire altar, sun (consisting of rosette of dots) above left, crescent moon above right
Date: c. 11th century
Weight: 4.2g
Diameter: 17 mm

 

Perhaps you were thinking of one like the upper left?

https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=3375191

They exist and I have seen them in archives, but none have been offered for sale since I started collecting these in 2016.

There was however one that I dropped out of bidding for when it topped $100, and I regret that decision to this day...


The series is fascinating because everything seems to point to the existing supply being just a very, very small portion of what originally existed. You could gather up thousands of these coins, and have only a handful of die matches in the whole lot. Maheshwari supposes that this means the coins were subject to such seignorage that the mints were continually melting and re-coining. Who knows how many entire types failed to survive the melting pot?

 

Afraid not being a subscriber, I could not blow up the pic to see the coin. The coins I have in mind look a lot like the Peroz issues themselves, in style and fabric.

Here are some more ramblings on the subject – which kind of fit with Maheshwari.

Consider two other groups of Hindu medieval issues. One the Shahi Bull & Horseman silver, the other the king/goddess coppers usually ascribed to the Hun Toramana II.

Both are broadly similar to the Indo-sasanid series in that they start with issues that are somewhat naturalistic and somewhat variable, and then converge on more rigidly stylistic and homogeneous designs. But the latter types seem to spread over 250 to 300 years, the Indo Sasanid over much longer, maybe 600 or 700 years.

On the Shahi coins, its important to focus on what we do not know. It is noticeable in associated groups that the later Spalapati coins are often somewhat more worn than the Samanta coin. This suggests that there were at least a couple of spurts over maybe 200 years. But was issue relatively continuous over that period, or was it more a stop start situation. Who knows?

On the Toramana issues I can say more – because I did by chance see a couple of groups of associated coins. One associated the early naturalistic coins with the stylised types. There was very little wear on the earlier coins (maybe GF). So the change to stylised types apparently came rapidly. The second was an association between late stylised Toramana types and later 9th century coins of Sangkara. The Toramanas were worn flat. It really looked like there had been a huge issue of these coppers maybe as early as 600 AD, and then nothing new for almost 300 years.

What does this mean for the Indo-Sasanid types? It makes me very hesitant to believe they were struck in uniform numbers, year in year out – much more likely in a bunch of squirts would be my guess.

Now there is a bit more potentially useful information – pointed out by Deyell years back. Thakura Pheru at the Delhi mint round about 1300 was receiving tons of looted coin from Gujarat, and would have a keen eye for the silver content of the various dishoarded coin types he saw. As I recall he distinguished 15 different kinds? I have not kept up on these matters, but to the best of my knowledge, little progress has has been made in figuring out what Pheru was talking about. However, his knowledge of alloys was excellent – so if a comprehensive study of the purity of these coins was undertaken, it might be possible to start to figure out more of what Pheru was talking about, and thus what really happened over all those centuries. And these successive re-coinages would of course - as Maheshwari says – be tied to extracting profits.

Rob T

Apologies for a boring post with no pictures! – Alice would hate it!

 

The coins of the times and places discussed here are interesting in the way they differed in approach from those of Rome that most of us find more familiar. We see coins of great diameter and thin fabric that weigh the same as coins of considerable thickness struck on oversize dies that guarantee no single coin will bear the whole design. We see an aversion to changing the basic design over long periods but with major style changes reminding me of the old owls of Athens. There are even coins of the same size and weight that separate denominations by alloy. Rome tried this once at the start of the Fel Temp coins but it did not last long at all. A person like myself whose background is Greek and Roman can find all this quite strange and either fascinating or confusing.

 

@ewc Are you referring to the "Dravya Pariksha" by chance? I was sent some scans of the relevant chapter of Deyell, and I'm not sure enough coins have been analyzed to try to make any firm attributions. Maheshwari ran XRF on a lot of his coins, but seems to have been less than interested in analyzing the debasement of the Gadhaiya coins, as he only analyzed a handful. Interestingly, his examples ranged from a hair over 90% fine to about 40%. It's worth noting:
1) Using Rome as an example, debasement is not always unidirectional; just look at Domitian who raised the purity of the denarius back to Republican era levels.
2) It's generally assumed that these coins were trade coins; as such, many issues may in fact be imitations which wouldn't apply to the purported mapping of net silver weight to Chaulukyan kings.

I've been trying with no luck to find an economical way to have some of my coins XRF tested. My LCS has a machine, but refuses to use it on anything except US coins and bullion, even when I offered to pay a fee per test ran.

 

Nearly 30 years back I came across the interesting book by Donald E Brown reviewed here

https://www.jstor.org/stable/40697993?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

He asks the question – why do some societies write history and others do not/ His answer takes a very broad brush approach – leaving many caveats – but I found it interesting, and an extension to it I think answers the sort of question you ask.

The Romans by and large wrote history, and had a centralised government that attempted to impact rather directly on individuals, and we see this reflected on the coinage itself.

Medieval Hindus wrote much more about religion, myth and philosophy rather than history. Government was more a matter of custom and religion than direct central rule. That too is reflected in the coinage.

It’s not just Rome vs India of course. The Chinese and Moslems write history, and tend to personalise politics and coin issue. Its not just India that substituted myth instead. There was a drift from history to myth in Europe from the dark ages right down to the renaissance, and sign of this in the coinage. England had kings called Henry, Richard and John, but the pennies call them all Henry (to save confusion as the old joke goes).

There are lots of holes in this account – opportunities to point to contradictory facts. But still I find it valuable. Probably what impresses me most is the way the “first historian” Herodotus is kind of created by a society that had already started to use coin, and, in the way I read him, almost gives an account of the history of the politics of the spread of coin use.

Rob T

 

Yes – has anyone put the whole thing to the web I wonder?

Two things to say about the author, Pheru. He ran what was very probably the biggest mint in pre-modern India, and thus one of the biggest pre-modern mints that ever existed, outside China. In all probability he oversaw the production of billions of coins, and they are all excellent in metal, in strike, in weight etc.

Secondly, we can identify some of the mostly obsolete coins he wrote about in Dravya Pariksha – the jitals of Delhi itself over the 13th century. And samples of those coins were re-analysed destructively by the Royal Mint back in the 1930’s. Pheru had got them all correct first time round.

So we know he was highly competent and that his book is a mine of valuable information. But we do not know how to decode it – the names of most of the coins are in obscure 13th century vernacular forms

I seem to have heard a lot about big institutions running metal analyses over the years – but less about interesting conclusions being reached. I am surely showing my bias – but that 1930's project at the Royal Mint was personally directed by a collector - Nelson-Wright – it was carefully targeted to get a specific and very useful result. On the other hand, the recent work seems disconnected, as if the projects were designed by professional academic grant committees, or some such. Its not clear to me that specific target hypotheses are being tested, and if they are, I do not seem to hear interesting conclusions coming out of them. Can anyone point out where I am wrong about this fear?

Rob T

 

That's just it, though, medieval Indians did write history. Maybe their history is more poetic and embellished, but we have kings list with VS or SE dates that cover most kings of most medieval kingdoms, and often a little bit regarding their martial prowess, generosity, and piety.

And, Gadhaiya and Bull & Horseman coins notwithstanding, nearly all medieval Indian coins state the issuing king plain as day on the reverse. Lots of Bull & Horseman coins and even a few types of Indo-Sassanian types even name their issuing authority. Now, the issue of why the two great medieval silver currencies are by and large anonymous is one of the great mysteries of Indian numismatics.

 

The fire-altar side is usually the reverse and would, therefore, be struck with the pile die. So, I wonder if you meant to say "the anvil die wasn't always the head side." [More about this below.]

I am not so sure. The anvil die projected up from the anvil and had an circular edge just like the reverse die. The obverse of a coin can curl up around the die like yours does. I admit that in Greek coins the reverse die was often smaller in diameter and we commonly see Greek coins with the metal curled up around the die on the reverse side and hardly ever see the edge of the obverse die (e.g. Athens owls). But, on your coin, we can see the edges of both dies (8:00 - 1:00 on the off-center obverse, 12:00-3:00 on the reverse). I think the head side is still the obverse. Your coin shows the two dies have about the same diameter--it is just that the obverse is so off-center than the flan extended beyond the die, which may have been the obverse die like usual.

 

No - that’s just not “it”.

Two criticisms - one on fact - another on generational attitude

Regarding fact - you are just wrong. Take the major set of Hindu kings ruling Delhi in the 11th and 12th centuries, foes of the Ghaznavids and Ghorids. There is no Hindu king list. Just as our information on Ancient Persians largely comes from external Greek and Roman sources, so our historical knowledge of those Hindu kings mostly comes from external Moslem sources.

But the big problem here is really your very understanding of what history is, which I would describe as Orwellian.

Al-Biruni, a sort of 11th century Moslem equivalent of Voltaire, wrote a 400 page contemporary account of Hindu India whilst living there, and stated that Hindu historical accounts were largely rubbish. H C Ray, an Indian scholar who wrote 1300 pages on Hindu Dynastic History in the 1930’s, agreed his conclusion. So Donald Brown merely re-stated the common consensus on the matter. A king list and a few unreliable platitudes concerning character do not constitute history. If it did - why ever would Herodotus have been called the first historian?

I wrote to Brown soon after his book came out, nice guy – he wrote a very candid reply. It was that by the 1990’s he was somewhat isolated within academic anthropology, and that most of what was put out by others in anthropology was in his view rubbish.

I agree with Brown. Much of what goes on today in academic anthropology and archaeology looks not like a scholarly study of the past ignorance, so much as a kind of subtle political propaganda for present ignorance.

Rob T

 

I finally bought one of these. I have yet to really research it or attribute it. I don't really know where to start so I thought I'd post it here! 16x15mm - 4.21grams

 

I was hoping someone may be able to help me attribute the coin in the post above. I took a run at it but... just don't know enough to be sure of anything or know what to look for. Any help would be appreciated! Thank you!

@Finn235 you seem know a lot about these, what do you (or anyone else that may know these) think? It seems like a nice example and I'd like to know more about them but don't know where to start!

 

Sorry, I don't know how I missed this the first time around!

Nice coin. It's a run of the mill Gadhaiya Paisa, likely made around 1000 AD or a little later. We are a long way from understanding these, if reaching such an understanding is possible. These are a lot like the Celtic Thasos tets in a way - we know what they imitate, and we can assemble something resembling a chronological set, but we really don't know exactly who made them, nor exactly when.

I don't have the Mitchiner or Deyell numbers memorized, but I am 99% sure this would be my type 1.4.3 - Intermediate style with line through the eye. It's a little hard to make out the eye, but I've never seen a fine style Gadhaiya like this one without. These make up probably 75% of all of series 1.4, and maybe up to half of all Gadhaiya sold on ebay in a typical year. Yours is special for having an exceptionally complete reverse.