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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;dougsmit, post: 1735450, member: 19463&quot;]Toward the end of the Shahi period (perhaps late 13th century) the dies were about twice the diameter of the flans so you can get very different looking coins even from the same die set.&nbsp; I don&#039;t have a die matched set to illustrate this but here are two Mahi Pala attributed coins (how I do not know).&nbsp; On the bull side both have a single spot in the center of the hump and part of the legend above but one is offset father than the other so there really are few letters that overlap (a hook like lower case r over the hump followed by what looks a bit like 14).&nbsp; The horse side shows mostly the rump but one coin shows the tail to the left better.&nbsp; I would imagine that one could assemble a dozen of these and get all of the die detail a little part at a time.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>I bought most of my bull/horseman coins from a pickout lot a couple years ago and tried to get coins with pretty full detail and heads on flan.&nbsp; VK&#039;s coin is later than most of mine and earlier than my two very late ones so it has a lot more detail on both sides.&nbsp; Such coins are a lot easier to read if you look at the full detail earlier ones first. VK&#039;s horse rump still has three dots while the later ones dropped to one.&nbsp; His legend still strikes me as reading Samanta Deva from earlier days but style changes.&nbsp;&nbsp; If I had known then about the progression in flan size, I might have bought a couple intermediate ones from that original batch but I started with the better silver and better detail coins and picked up the Mahi Pala pair a year later when I realized I needed them to show the progressive worsening of the design.&nbsp; My page on the coins remains available but has not been updated.&nbsp; I am not inclined to pay the prices I see asked for some of these now.&nbsp; I still do not have a really well struck coin of any variety.&nbsp; Poorly struck coins are common; perfect ones do not seem to exist.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p><a href="http://www.forumancientcoins.com/dougsmith/bh.html" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://www.forumancientcoins.com/dougsmith/bh.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.forumancientcoins.com/dougsmith/bh.html</a></p><p>[ATTACH]272243.vB[/ATTACH][ATTACH]272244.vB[/ATTACH][/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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