Reply to Thread

Message:: [QUOTE="THCoins, post: 1975890, member: 57364"]Nice to see some of these ! There among my favorite ancient Indian small change types.The peacock is the dynastic symbol of the Gupta rulers. Coins with this reverse can be found from three succesive rulers:- Chandragupta. He originally copied the type from the Western Satrap drachms. Replacing the arched hill of the satraps with the peacock. These are generally nicely excecuted on a thin flan and rather scarce.- Kumaragupta. Thesea are the most prevalent. These range from fine silver with a thin flan to a later low quality silver dumpy flan. That's the TS's type.- Skandagupta. He was the last important Gupta ruler. During his reign the coins degenerate to very crude almost pure copper pieces. To positively identify the rulers, their name is in the edge inscription in Brahmi. You dont have to learn Brahmi though. Just have to regognize a few characters. The name always starts after the "Sri" (Lord) charcter. Even if the name part of the legend is not visisible, Kumaragupta and Skandagupta can be distinguisehd by their epithet. Kumaragupta's title is Mahendraditya, Skandagupta's title is Kramaditya.Here an early specimen of Skandagupta:[ATTACH=full]351315[/ATTACH][/QUOTE]