Featured A coin from a mint on the edge of the world

Sidon - Phoenicia
Head of Ptolemy I right, struck under Ptolemy II.
Eagle head- left, Sigma Iota above monogram in left field.
SNG Cop 514

 

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Nice write up

I think the oldest Afghan coins are going to be the so called Kabul Valley issues - very rare, most known ones came from the Chaman-i-Hazouri Hoard.

See:

https://www.cemml.colostate.edu/cultural/09476/images/afgh05-106-05.jpg

Current thinking is that these early Kabul coins inspired the Indian punchmarked series

 

Laodikea ad Libanum

Demetrius II - Reverse has Baal Beryt (Poseidon) holding trident. Star in right field.
SC 2185.
The legend or Phoenician Myth tells that the great god Aal offered his daughter Beryt to the Greek god of the sea(Poseidon) in exchange of saving the city from high tides which follow a big Earthquake (Tsunami). Hence that city took the name of Beryt (Beirut).
The Phoenician woman used to call her husband her baal, that is her god.
So Baal Beryt is Beryt's husband, that is Poseidon.
This coin tells this story which was nevertheless corroborated by cuneiform on papyrus found in Palmyra and Ras Shamra ( Ugarit) in Syria.

 

Thanks for the link. I would be curious which of those were minted in the area. Obviously coins from India minted to the east and Persian, minted to the west are older.

@7Calbrey that is a rare coin, thanks for showing.

 

All the coins but three shown on the link are Kabul Valley issues - there are few coins but still much variety. The three at the bottom are from Sardis, but had found their way East. Actually, many Greek coins were also making it to Afghanistan early on, there are two of three mixed hoards showing this

We do not have firm dates for the Kabul issues but the assumption is Kabul latched onto coinage early, copying the idea from Greek/Lydian practice. And India rapidly copied the idea from them, via the Taxila bars. All this was maybe happening c. 500 or 450 BC - that's my guess anyhow. Somehow these people were ripe for coinage, long before Egypt, or Persia proper.

Rob T

 

My guess would be Alexander. He started the coinage tradition in the area, and then being along the Silk Road southern branch into India, the idea of coinage naturally passed into the area.

OP, thanks for a great thread. I recently got interested in the mint after finding out the Seleucid Antiochos coin was the prototype for Sogdian pieces. I do not have the reference you posted, (will go on my list to get), but reminded me of the CNG publications and I pulled down CNS 1, Seleucid Coins of Bactria. It looks like it will get me started.

Edit: Looking back Rob, of course Alexander was a dumb answer. I still think the Silk Road is involved. The Silk Road used to run more southerly through Bactria until the Scythian then Kushan invasions laid waste to Bactria. At that time, it moved northerly into Sogdiana. Both times, though, a Indian branch would have moved through Kabul into India.

 

Great article and beautiful coins.

 

As I recall Alexander is recorded as surprised to be paid out by Taxiles in coin. If so it tell us that India was already using coin before Alexander got there.

That is rather obviously true if you look at Magadha/Mauryan coins. North West India seems to have been recaptured from Alexander’s governors by the Mauryas just 8 years after Alexander left. Magadha/Mauryan in their home territories in the North East of India (Bihar) had surely been producing coins long before that.

Neither (Central) Persian nor Central Asia, both on this proposed “Silk Route”, were issuing coins at a very early date. Bihar was not on this “Silk Route” and was issuing coin early. Such evidence suggests that this “Silk Route” matter was not relevant to adoption of coin use. Because coins are just not primarily to do with international trade. They are to do with domestic trade and tax collection. International trade was driven (in part) by weighed bullion already - long before coins.

It is reasonable to call things like Athenian tetradrachms “trade coins” – but we should not imagine Athens to be somehow altruistically devoted to free trade for its own sake. Ancient Attica was a bit like modern Saudi Arabia (or Libya or Venezuela). Just as the latter skew(ed) their whole political system because they are sitting on huge oil deposits – so Attica could skew its whole political system because it was sitting on a silver mountain. Athenian tets were surely put out to cover a positive trade imbalance with the rest of the Greek world – perhaps in large part to import slave labour. So Athenian tets would indeed become “trade coins” - but that would not be the primary goal of Athens in creating them.

Rob T

 

My reference about the Silk Road was more knowledge sharing than the physical coins making their way across it. The great advantage the old world had versus the new was the ability to learn and copy from other cultures.

While I am certain coinage originated in the Middle East and China completely independently, (each having their own proto-currency, each using unique attributes and value points for their coins), I have always wondered about India. Did they have proto-currency to large extents? Do we see evolution of their monetary system up towards a currency, which would support the theory of independent evolution? If they just kind of "popped up" one day that would lead to the idea of a borrowed idea. Do you happen to know if Mitchiner covers this in his two volume work?

Concerning Athens, I agree they were not altruistic. They were monetizing their Laurion mines, and pumping as much out as possible. Too many people do not "get" that the Athenian tet was not the world standard because of the glory of Athens, but because they flooded the ancient world with them. Ancient world "quantitative easing" lol.

 

I am very intrigued by the Indus Valley Civilization that arose virtually simultaneously as the Euphrates and Chinese Civilizations. However, I understand that their script has not been translated, and that their major cities were not always placed near major geographic formations. I understand that area was so fertile, with so many streams and small rivers, that the civilization did not need to locate beside a major river. Further, it interests me that later Indo-European migrations came from this and Central Eurasian areas. So much unknown, and because unknown, lost history.

 

Yeah. The downfall of collecting Central Asian coins is the sadness of what was lost. Almost nothing is known for centuries at a time. We have tiny snippets from Chinese documents, we have coins that record long lost rulers and kingdoms, and a little archeology, (though this area of the world is notorious for any ruins discovered being lost forever).

What we would give to discover a few books recording the history of Bactria/Sogdia/NW India from 300BC to 500 AD. So, so much was lost to time. While sad, it does make you feel a little better being a coin collector and buying books, supporting scholars trying to use coinage to piece together what history can be reconstructed.

 

Interesting questions – I looked into this about 15 years back – Have not heard that anything new has come up since, has anyone seen recent new work?

INDIA – Joe Cribb put out a series of papers 20 years back looking at the limited hard evidence for first Indian coins and their dates (see his Academia pages). His basic suggestion was that Western coinage inspired local copies in Afghanistan, which then evolved and spread into N. India yielding the punchmarked types. Hard evidence for dates is very sparse – mainly one mixed hoard of Greek and PMC’s (bent bars etc) from Afghanistan. Joe argued that first coins in India might be as late as c. 370 BC. Most people thought that a bit too late. Previous people (like PL Gupta) preferred 600 BC – but that does not work if the coins evolved from western models. Maybe we should split the difference?

CHINA – I am amazed that I am hearing nothing in recent years on the archaeology of coin origins from China – has anyone else got better sources? The last I heard was a tentative suggestion from the BM of c. 500 BC for first coins in China. In his “Ancient Trades” book Mitchiner took this further, and suggested the Chinese “Fish Money” (which seems to me to be a sort of wind chime) copied ideas from the Greek fish coppers of Olbia. Seemed a bit of a stretch to me - possible, but unlikely. However, if 500 BC is about right then it does seem likely the idea of coin use came to China from the West. But even more than India - it was the idea of using coins that took root and spread rapidly – not the form the coins themselves took.

Important to note that coin use was very popular in Ancient India and China. Officially sanctioned coin use in Egypt and Persia came later and was imposed after military conquest. But coin use seems to leapfrog Persia and spread like wildfire through early Hindu states in much the way it did in the Greek world – by something like popular demand. Likewise China was apparently in some way ripe for coin use at roughly the same time as Greece and India.

Rob T

 

Yes - As far as I can discover Egypt and Ancient Persia were using weights (for trade?) by 3,000 BC. Indus valley by 2,600 BC. [We still seem to have no weights from China before about 600 BC - but they surely must exist (?)].

Contrast that with England - weights nearly made it here around 1300 BC (joke - one from then was recently found from a shipwreck off the Devon coast). But that aside we really have next to no pre-Roman weights.

But the really strange thing about the very early Indus weights is they seem to follow exactly the same standard as the very much later Mauryan coins, Shahi coins and and indeed Vijayanagar gold pagodas - all very close to 3.43g! (A suvarna (of 4 coins) of c. 13.7g)

This is so strange that modern archaeologists etc seem almost to pretend it did not happen - but work back in the 1930's shows rather definitively that it did. Perhaps I should write to Graham Hancock about it.....

Rob T

PS another thing is - there are a lot of Indus Valley weights - but hardly any thought seems to be given to what they were weighing. Did they have thriving markets driven by weighed bullion?

 

I have read the much earlier dating of Indian coins, but that is an older idea. It came up around the same time as some were dating Chinese coins to 8th century BC and some were trying to make a case of Lydian coins going back just as far. I think we had an "arms race" of different cultures trying to claim "oldest coin" personally. It is almost always researchers native tot he area making these much older claims, so a little ethnic pride I would say might have been in place.

I would date earliest Indian coins around 370-400BC as well. I was just curious if anyone had ever heard of a series of proto-money in India, (I hadn't), that could possibly support an earlier date. Without proto-money, I would say the case is sealed for borrowing the idea from others, which would by definition put it later than the other 2 centers of coinage innovation.

I find it interesting how this idea went south but not north. Sogdia never had coins struck there until after Alexander.

 

Total history would be the sum of trillions of acts by billions of people over millennia. So massive simplifications to get to generalisations that are understandable are unavoidable. And people being people build all sorts of self serving bias into making the simplifications. This particular date matter is surely one, but one of a very long list……..

More a matter of East really – just three very fertile populous zones between about 20 and 45 degrees North.

There seem to be two further points of similarity regarding the three zone.

a) all three were in a period of intellectual ferment/revolution (sophists/upanishads/100 schools)

b) all three zones were balkanised into warring mini-states

Seems like maybe the states had to monetize to keep up with each other in a kind of ‘modernising intellectual arms race’.

I would think particularly about say the reactionary Plato – who wished to restore stability by making it illegal for ordinary citizens to ever meet foreigners (Statesman)

Or alternatively in China – the Guanzi has a chapter on waging economic warfare. The plan being to disable the enemy state by manufacturing goods very cheaply and flooding their market - in order to weaken them financially……………..

Rob T