Bought a coin marked Indo-Sass, but what is it? No other Info

I picked this one up this week it was in a holder marked INDO-SASS and after scouring pages and pages of catalogues, Krause, Spink I can't locate it. Any help with ID? Origin? Date? Value? I picked it up for $4 so its not any big loss if I can't ID it, but, this is the fun part of hunting coins!

 

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http://www.zeno.ru/showgallery.php?cat=2980

 

$4 is about right for average ones and yours is a bit nicer than many so I might even say $10 for the decent centering. Many are a lot worse. You do have the obverse upside down. Indo-Sasananian refers to coins from the region between the old Sasanian realm (Persia) and India that roughly copied types of the Sasanians with the reverse of the fire altar. Yours is late and hardly recognizable but you may get the picture better if you look at the development as shown on my page on the subject.
http://www.forumancientcoins.com/dougsmith/gadpaisa.html



These are about the best hunk of medieval silver you can buy for $5. They made millions of them and very few people seem to care about the minor variations (even the major variations) so they are a bit of a glut on the market. I suspect poor ones are being melted as I write this. I suspect yours is 1000-1200 AD but I'm not able to break them down beyond that.

 

Thank you so much, I have lurked on these forums for years and learned a lot, this is the first time I really couldn't figure it out myself. So I finally created a user ID and joined in here. I shoulda joined long ago! I really appreciate the help! - Aaron

 

These coins are pretty seriously under-researched. Doug's date range looks about right.

 

I agree the date range seems correct. These were near the last of the type that were still good silver.

Btw, India is still the largest concentration of zoroastrinists in the world.

 

Those of us who are used to Roman coins have trouble with the way the Indian coins worked in a metal sense. Rome started debasing their coins and change weight standards frequently. The Indian coins weighed about the same over many centuries and took centuries to drop in silver content rather than months or years like the Romans. These later things were crude in some ways and got thick and chunky as the fashion changed from Sasanian thin to lumps that contained half of the die design at best. They also never took to the need of updating legends and dates on a regular basis so we have millions of coins that look very much alike. It is amazing how different cultures saw the needs of money.

 

True. I simply view it as the "Indianization" of the culture. After a few centuries the culture and history of why things were done a certain way gives way to the current culture they were living in.

The only reason the Sassanid coins were thin to begin with was that they used Parthian and Roman silver coins as bases, and hammered them thin to obliterate the design under Ardashir. This style of coinage then became the norm for the Sassanids, and later the Islamic conquerers of Persia.

The Persians in India simply forgot "why" coins had to be flat and thin, and started making their coins like others around them.

Thats how I have always viewed it at least. I could be completely wrong.

 

I was once told that the reason for certain later Indian coins being struck on dies much larger than the coins was that no one coin could be used to produce a set of counterfeit dies. We recently saw here a struck counterfeit of Trajan, I believe, where the flan was larger than the copy die so there was a place were the design stopped abruptly before the edge of the flan. Cast counterfeits give themselves away by being off center all the same way. Copy dies made from several coins would be harder to execute so the fake coins would not all be suspiciously alike. It is an interesting theory.