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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;EWC3, post: 4354664, member: 93416&quot;]Yes - there is a tradition that after the collapse of Empire a remnant of the Mauryan line set up at Vidisha, just up the road from Ujjain.&nbsp; Perhaps that is why these tiny remnant pmc coppers carried on there for a while?</p><p><br /></p><p>The fact that the Mauryan silver pmc’s weigh almost the same as Roman imperial denarii at c 3.4g seems to be just a coincidence.&nbsp; However, the preference for an economy driven by a small silver units is surely a somewhat comparable state of affairs. So its interesting to note that the Romans kept that show on the road till the 3rd century AD, while India was producing a miserable copper remnant already in the 2nd century BC. More than that, the switch to an Indian (Kushan) gold/copper system in the late first century AD ran a couple of century ahead of such developments under Constantine in the Roman West.</p><p><br /></p><p>It is as if the Indian economy &#039;ran hot&#039; somehow. I long wondered why that was, and suspect it is to do with an especially independent mindedness in Hindu merchants. Your silver piece is one from a huge stock of old silver pmc’s (‘purana’) that went on circulating for centuries after the Mauryans were long gone. (Tons of them are completely worn out and have gone to the melting pot, even in recent times). So even residual Post-Mauryan regional governments were no longer getting their hands on them in most places, to re-strike the silver. They were reduced to issuing coppers. Tax payers had gone on strike, for centuries.</p><p><br /></p><p>Despite my earlier joke, I think there is often a lot more to be learned from worn out silvers and miserable coppers than more prestigious pieces.</p><p><br /></p><p>Rob T[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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