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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;dougsmit, post: 1489142, member: 19463&quot;]I&#039;m no specialist here but my guess is Samprati (Mauryan) 224-215 BC or 216-207 BC (depending on which king list you believe).&nbsp; Note that the same coins can come in many shapes so you could fing a square or rectangle with the same marks.&nbsp; There should be 5 distinct marks on one side and one on the other but you sometimes see bankers marks making even the overlapping originals hard to see.&nbsp; There are many fakes but I believe this look perfectly fine.&nbsp; Most fakes I have seen try too hard to make the symbols legible and it is unusual to see a coin with a really good strike of more than a couple of the 5 marks.&nbsp; Here I see the sun (right) and six armed device (upper left), the hill (left) and bull with another skull under his head(above sun and upside down) That leaves the thing just left of the sun and right of the hill which I suspect is what to my eye looks like a house with a tree on top (off flan here).</p><p><br /></p><p>As luck would have it I have two similar coins below but mine show different parts of that last mentioned mark.&nbsp; I show both to make the point that they come square or round.&nbsp;&nbsp; If I&#039;m right on all this, the coin would catalog Mitchiner, Ancient and Classical World, 4195.&nbsp; The denomination is called Karshapana or 32 rattis.&nbsp; My having two when I have so few punchmark coins suggests this is among the most common types and adds to the theory that the coin is certainly genuine.&nbsp; If I were going to all the trouble to make these, I&#039;d make something more rare and expensive.&nbsp; Compared to some rulers of the dynasty, Samprati ruled for a short time so I can not explain the coins being so common.&nbsp; I found interest that this article lists him as ruling for 9 years but comments that the Jain tradition says he ruled 53 years which would certainly explain the coins being common.&nbsp; I don&#039;t know but suggest you could possibly enjoy studying more about him.&nbsp; Wikipedia is rarely a place to answer all your questions but can be a good place to start if you know as little as I do.&nbsp; Enjoy both the coin and the study.</p><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samprati" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samprati" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samprati</a></p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH]189299.vB[/ATTACH][ATTACH]189300.vB[/ATTACH][/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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