Message:

<p>[QUOTE=&quot;EWC3, post: 5186517, member: 93416&quot;]Yes - lots of Roman gold and silver coin in South India.&nbsp; All the old books tend to say the Kushans too got their stater weight by copying the aureus.&nbsp; That is why it is important to get the exact weights of these carefully made items.&nbsp; 8 grams is slightly high for an aureus - but 300 grams is low for a libre.</p><p><br /></p><p>Falk has posted a lot of detail about a kind of Indian version of Attic used by the Bactrian greeks - his info is good - from inscriptions on silver vessels (a practice they seem to get from Persians).&nbsp; Added to that we have a few very rare early symbolic Hindu gold coins - just one in the BM, but Kulkarni found and published a few more. They seem to be very carefully adjusted in weight to 2.15g – this near exactly half an attic drachm weight. And by coincidence it is also 20 rattis to the Indus Valley standard (see my text p. 148). Ancient Hindu texts go on and on and on about an 80 ratti gold standard, and these coins shows seem how it was first applied in India. The reduction from 2.15g to 2 grams (ie 8.6g to 8g for the di-drachm) is in line with what the Indo-Greeks did with silver standards – taking a 1/16th as seigniorage.</p><p><br /></p><p>So text and coin seem to fit to an Indian version of Attic from Afghanistan making it 80 rattis. There is no corresponding narrative for a derivation from the aureus – they are just similar but slightly different in weight.</p><p><br /></p><p>As a young guy I met a Russian prof in the BM who strongly held this sort of aureus account of Kushan weight standards. I pointed out to him that the Kushan stater was just as close to half a Chinese liang as it was to an aureus. He grabbed me by the scarf (it was a really cold day) in order to aggressively instruct me that I was wrong! Ha – amazing how firmly people grip their preferred ideas.</p><p><br /></p><p>Basically – the attic via Afghanistan idea gives a very coherent account of why 8 grams came to be 80 rattis - if you follow the detail. The sea version via gold coins lacks that coherent sort of back story. Not that it is definitely wrong – but it does not fit the evidence in the elegant way the landward version does. Or so it seems to me.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

Your name or email address:

Do you already have an account?

• No, create an account now.
• Yes, my password is:
• Forgot your password?

Stay logged in