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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Finn235, post: 8194920, member: 98035&quot;]Very excited for this new purchase to finally arrive!</p><p><br /></p><p>When this one popped up in my eBay saved search feed, I was immediately drawn to the portrait, but once I saw the pictures of the reverse I immediately realized what was being offered:</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1435318[/ATTACH] </p><p><br /></p><p>At first glance this appears to be a rather ordinary type 1.3 &quot;Tall Head&quot; which is encountered fairly regularly. The head is a bit &quot;goofy&quot; looking and the chin should be connected to the head but isn&#039;t- but overall the obverse is well within stylistic guidelines. The important detail here is the reverse - not only is the fire altar engraved a bit too large for the series, but the attendants are totally absent, replaced by two parallel rows of far too many dots.</p><p><br /></p><p>This may seem like an easy detail to miss to the casual observer, but to whatever authority made these coins, it was of critical importance!</p><p><br /></p><p>The formula was initially set in about the middle of 1.2, when the attendants disjointed into a line for the body, a line for the arm, two breasts, a beaded necklace of about 4 pellets, and a featureless head[ATTACH=full]1435324[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>Once 1.2 began to morph into 1.3, the form was set in stone</p><p>[ATTACH=full]1435325[/ATTACH] </p><p><br /></p><p>1.3 marked a radical change in the portrait and quality of workmanship, but the attendants were carefully preserved</p><p>[ATTACH=full]1435326[/ATTACH] </p><p><br /></p><p>Even as the series progressed</p><p>[ATTACH=full]1435327[/ATTACH] </p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1435328[/ATTACH] </p><p><br /></p><p>Once series 1.3 came to an end in favor of the more consistent Gadhaiya, the spacing became much tighter, but the formula survived unscathed</p><p>[ATTACH=full]1435329[/ATTACH] </p><p><br /></p><p>It is fair to state, then, that while the engravers of this coin did a good job of copying, they were not trained in the proper preparation of Gadhaiya dies, and thus this coin is almost certainly an imitation.</p><p><br /></p><p>Compared to another of roughly the same type, it probably would have passed unnoticed.</p><p>[ATTACH=full]1435331[/ATTACH] </p><p><br /></p><p>But who made it?</p><p><br /></p><p>The whole of Indo Sassanian coinage is itself technically a series of barbarous imitations of Peroz, made by largely unknown parties, and yet the number of coins which could be considered &quot;barbarous&quot; is vanishingly small - this would be probably my third imitation, in addition to two fourrees. I spotted one additional on eBay India (the seller strongly rebuked me for even asking if he would ship to the US), and I have not seen any in Maheshwari, Mitchiner, Deyell, or Zeno.ru. The closest thing to imitations of any Gadhaiya from Track 1, ironically, are two historically known rulers, Somalladevi, queen consort of Ajayadeva (1110-1135) and Chittaraja, king of North Konkan, who is known only from exceedingly rare coins and a couple inscriptions from 1022 and 1035.</p><p><br /></p><p>Speaking of Chittaraja...</p><p>[ATTACH=full]1435336[/ATTACH] </p><p><br /></p><p>The overall style of the obverse, in particular the detached chin seem like an excellent match to me. That his obverse are distinct from other types of official Gadhaiya indicates that he imitated the &quot;official&quot; issues and did not issue them, thus his workers would not have been formally trained on the importance of each dot in the attendants&#039; bodies.</p><p><br /></p><p>As for why they would do this - we don&#039;t know much about how the medieval Indians treated an economy based almost entirely on the Damma, but we do know that the differences were important to them - contemporary literature mention some two to three dozen types of Damma (there are at least 50-75 distinct types of Indo Sassanian currencies in total) and we also know that some were preferable to others, probably in a way analogous to how an ancient trader probably would have preferred payment in Athenian owls, but Corinthian staters would also do. Given the extreme rarity of Chittaraja&#039;s coinage (&gt;50 examples total?) it would make sense that his coinage did not carry the &quot;street cred&quot; of the bona fide 1.3 Gadhaiya. Therefore, it would be expedient to attempt to imitate the real deal, either under royal authority, or as an illegal pet project.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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