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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;EWC3, post: 4589707, member: 93416&quot;]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?</p><p><br /></p><p><b>INDIA</b> – 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?</p><p><br /></p><p><b>CHINA</b> – 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 <b>idea</b> 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.</p><p><br /></p><p>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.</p><p><br /></p><p>Rob T[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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