The King of Kings, Lord of All the World (or; adventures in dead languages)

Recently acquired this pleasing tetradrachm of the slightly obscure Vima Kadphises (or "Ooemo Kadphises," as his Greek subjects apparently knew him). This is undoubtedly the sort of issue for which phrases like "decent for this type" were invented:



Not the easiest item to photograph (with just a phone camera, especially) -- in-hand the legends show up a little better. This is a common type -- indeed, more or less the only type -- but having never owned a Kushan before I find the imagery rather striking.

On the obverse we've got (presumably) a depiction of the man himself, clad in robust nomadic costume: a thick overcoat, heavy boots and some kind of kalpak on his head. He sacrifices at a small altar (try not to think about the perspective too hard), surrounded by symbols the meaning of which I have no idea: on the left, a trident / axe combination; to the right, a Hercules-esque club below the royal monogram. The legend is in Greek, with the idiosyncrasies typical of the region and period: BACIΛEVC [BACIΛEWN C]WTHΡ ΜΕΓΑC OOΗΜO ΚΑΔΦICΗC (Vima Kadphises, the King of Kings, the Great Saviour).

The reverse shows a figure the authorities regard as the god Shiva, trident in hand. He's depicted radiate and wearing some drapery which shows up reasonably. Behind him stands a bull of presumably some religious significance. On some of these emissions the deity holds a deerskin in his left hand, in others not -- I think some of the indistinct blobs behind the bull's head represent the deerskin in question. In the left field lies (what I understand to be an unidentified) monogram.

The wonderfully baroque reverse legend, romanised, reads Maharajasa Rajadirajasa Sarvaloga Isvarasa Mahisvarasa Vima Kathphishasa Tratara (of the Great King Vima Kadphises, the King of Kings, Lord of All the World, the Mahesvara (a religious title)).

The legend appears on the coin in the Kharosthi script: the authorities I have access to, i.e. the free online sources (Wildwinds and etc., plus the formidable Catalogue of Coins in the Punjab Museum) all however render it in the Latin script. Having discovered that Kharosthi is actually available in Unicode, I very naïvely figured it wouldn't be much effort to look at the Kharosthi alphabet on Wikipedia, and use it transcribe the romanisation back into Kharosthi via some judicious copypasting.



Suffice to say, this was not so easily achieved. The script is relatively straightforward, conceptually: we have about six vowels and thirty-odd consonants and consonant combinations. Each consonant is assumed to have an "a" sound after it (e.g. Maharajasa is spelled out as m-h-r-j-s), and other vowel sounds are added to consonants by way of diacritical marks. The terminal "a" sound is removed by adding a curious invisible mark, which also automatically creates ligatures with whatever consonants are put after it. As a non-linguist I find all this terribly confusing. Unfortunately the key part of the legend, the royal name, was also the most indecipherable: a single character, , seems to be used to represent the thphi sound of Kathphishasa. I still don't know how to actually form this character but, happily, I was able to find it on a page treating on the technical aspects of the script as a Unicode item.

The Wikipedia article contains a chart of Kharosthi letters on Graeco-Indian Coins taken from a 1910 publication by the inimitable Barclay Head. This is rather helpful, though by its nature unable to assist with rendering the legends in text form (and it seems to err in rendering the vital as phthi instead of thphi).

Anyway after many headaches, I take the legend, in Kharosthi, to be:

​

I'd be deeply obliged if anybody more philosophical than myself could weigh in here: am I completely off-base with this or does it seem alright? Comparing it to the better-preserved gold specimens on Google Images it seems accurate (allowing for some variation in how those render the letters), but beyond the first and last words I don't get any hits when I try to search for it -- though this might just be a reflection of the lack of online material.

As a technical note: this forum doesn't seem to possess a font that can render Kharosthi, so the excerpts here are screenshots taken from my word-processor. The script appears correctly in the post composition box but not in posts themselves, curiously.

Post some Kushans or difficult scripts or whatever you feel is relevant.

 

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Great historical lesson, beautifull coin!


Here is my Vima Kadphises AV Dinar Peshawar Mint

 

Extremely attractive: the crudeness of the Kushan bronzes makes a strange contrast with the fineness of their gold.

It seems like your example has the same mint mark(?) as mine -- do you have a source for the mint identifications?

 

Much better than "decent for the type" - one of the nicest I've seen. Great catch!

 

According to John Deyell, gold Dinars were struck in Peshawar Mint (present day Pakistan) Later on they also used the Balkh Mint in Bactria. I was lucky to get this example from Rauch Auction/Austria in 2017. Coin was catalogued as stempelglanz=mintstate.
John

 

I always loved the Shiva chillin' out with Bull on the reverses of these, nice example! there is nothing like relaxing next to a bull and "putting out the vibe"
it would be perfect if he had a drinking cup in his free hand
Marcos X

 

Interesting coin and a great write up!!!

 

Only one KUSHAN coin:


INDIA Kushan Empire Vima Takto-Soter Megas Æ Tetradrachm 21mm 8.5g AD 80-100 bust r holding scepter tamgha behind on horse r holding axe tamgha Senior B17.1vT

I always thought OSCAN was cool:


Campania CAPUA AE 14-5mm 216-211 Hera Oscan Grain ear Hannibal capital Italia SNG Fr 517 SNG ANS 219 HN Italy 500 EE Clain Stefanelli

SCYTHIAN SCRIPT:


India Indo-Scythian King Azes I 57-30BCE AR Drachm

 

That is indeed a very nice example! Mine is also nice "for the type":


As a generalist collector I'm no expert on these, but my understanding is that the symbol in the obverse right field is a quasi-monogram but should be called a "tamgha." (It's derived from the one on his father's coin shown by @Alegandron.) These are family/tribal symbols used by steppe nomads, and hearken back to the Kushans' Yueh-zhi roots, a nomadic people forced west by the migration of the Xiongnu ("Huns"?), who were in turn defeated by the Chinese Han dynasty. (Tamghas can also be found on Hunnic and Mongol coinage.)

The symbol in the left field of the reverse is usually called the Buddhist "triratna" or "three jewels." (Mine is a bit wonky, yours is nice.) The symbol is associated with "Buddha's footprint", and combines a lotus petal, a diamond rod, and the three jewels proper, symbolizing the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha. Interestingly, the triratna is quite similar to the Hindu symbol for Nandi's footprint, Nandi being Shiva's bull depicted on the reverse. The Kushans seem to have been big on religious pluralism, and found a nice expression of it here.

Kushan coinage is fascinating. Thanks for the detailed presentation of the script, about which I know practically nothing!

 

Great coins! Here is another one of mine...Kanishka I
Reverse "Mao" Moon God AV Dinar ND Peshawar Mint/127-51AD

 

Yes, Kushan coinage is definitely a fascinating and under appreciated specialty. I recently posted this AE drachm of Kanishka I, featuring the goddess Nanaia on the reverse:

 

Thank you for your hard work trying to get the inscription into Unicode. I have struggled with the same thing. It is unfortunate that CoinTalk rejects these characters. Can you post the HTML entities?

I have several coins with difficult scripts that I have struggled to get into Unicode. I'll start with Kharosthi. The coins of Menander are very nice. Here are two.


The first one has a great portrait! I liked it so much that I uploaded it in 2004 to Wikipedia and made it the portrait of Menander on the page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menander_I . I hope that thousands of children doing reports on the Indo-Greek kings are using my coin for their illustration.

The second coin is a bit soft on the obverse but very well struck and we should be able to read the Kharosthi. Coin catalogs usually just say "Kharosthi inscription Maharajasa tratarasa Menamdrasa. Sometimes they translate it as “The Savior King Menander”

Barclay Head figured out over 100 years ago how to print the inscriptions. He gave them as . You should be able to see that on the reverse of the coin.

I struggled with getting this into Unicode. The common numismatic transliteration didn't fit into Unicode. I also had Richard Plant's book on Asiatic coin inscriptions, which gives all of the letters, but some of the things Plant wants, like "Long A augmentation" and "Compound akshara DR" and don't map into the Unicode terms.

I would love to paste the Unicode here so you can see it but CoinTalk doesn't take Unicode and not all browsers render it. On the Mac it looks sweet in Safari but I had to download a font to get it working in Chrome and the font I choose is pretty ugly. So I will show it as an image: .

Here is the HTML. I had to cheat and use a zero-width space to make the Ma-E look nice.

<!-- Mauharajasa -->&#x10A28;&#x10A02;&#x10A31;&#x10A2A;&#x10A17;&#x10A2F;

<!-- ta-ta-ra-sa -->&#x10A1F;&#x10A1F;&#x10A2A;&#x10A2F;

<!-- Ma-e-na-d-ra-sa; using a zero-width space to help position e -->&#x10A28;&#x10A05;<!-- replace this comment with zero width space &#x200b;-->&#x10A23;<!-- The next is just ra, I couldn't do the compound DR -->&#x10A2A;&#x10A2F;

 

I have seen these separated according to the angle of the club in the obverse field but I have no idea why someone thought that was significant. My angled one is pretty nice on the obverse


but my straight up and down club is not even nice for these.

 

For the most attractive Kushan coin, that I sorely miss, see my avatar. Here's more about it.

 

Note that Kharosthi is now properly encoded in Windows 10, natively. So, no more copying and pasting, or using a broken font (which is what I was doing earlier). The ligatures in Kharosthi are acutally very complicated and hence no public fonts were producing them correctly. Andrew Glass, the authority on Kharosthi encodings, now works for Microsoft who created the Kharosthi engine to properly render the font:

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2015/02/23/windows-shapes-the-worlds-languages/

 

Can you send a screenshot of the HTML I wrote? I had trouble especially with the Ma-E combo.

 

Great effort to dive into this difficult script ! It took me also quite some time to be able to read it at a basic level. Never tried to make the next step to reproduction in the wordprocessor.
Here a related one of Kujula Kadphises, with legend transcription of the name part:
(Old picture, has some flaws in transcription)


I largely agree with your transcription in the opening post. Only have some doubts on your conjunct characters. Your "Rva" and "Sva" look incorrect to me. But i am certainly not an expert.

 

Thank you everybody for your contributions! Some very pleasing coins and some highly learned commentary.

Much wisdom here, for which I thank you kindly. I feel strangely vulgar for assuming the triratna symbol was a mint mark! The die scuptors' eyes were cast heavenwards more than mine were, clearly. Definitely, in general, the apparently easy-going religious heterodoxy of these emissions is very pleasing.

I fear this might be beyond my abilities -- I'm somewhat illiterate, technologically (feel free to elaborate on the method here if you like). Pastebin can apparently accommodate the script so I've uploaded it here in text form, if that's any use. And two very pleasing Menanders! I'll get around to uploading a few images to Wikipedia eventually: with how much it's referenced, I rather like the idea of one of my contributions becoming the "definitive" version of something.

Beautiful! That inscription is fantastic (and the ornament at groin level is rather phallic, no?) Wish I had anything at all to add regarding the club, which is tantalising.

Thanks for weighing in! I was rather unsure on these two myself: rendering them as rua and sua seemed to produce better results (going v -> u, i.e.), but I have no justification for doing that whatsoever, it was the result of pure trial-and-error.

 

Wonderful neat coin and very cool writeup!

 

Here are a coin I translated using Windows 10 and BabelMap:

Indo-Scythian: Azilizes (ca. 85-45/35 BCE) AR Tetradrachm (Hoover 576; Senior 50.1T)

Obv: BAΣIΛEΩΣ BAΣIΛEΩN MEΓAΛOY AZIΛIΣOY; King on horseback right, holding spear; to the right
Rev: Majarajasa rajarajasa mahatasa Ayalishasa in Kharosthi; Athena standing left, holding shield with aegis and thunderbolt; monograms in fields





&#x10A28;&#x10A3A;&#x10A31;&#x10A2A;&#x10A17;&#x10A2E; &#x10A2A;&#x10A17;&#x10A2A;&#x10A17;&#x10A2E; &#x10A28;&#x10A31;&#x10A3A;&#x10A1F;&#x10A2E; &#x10A00;&#x10A29;&#x10A01;&#x10A2C;&#x10A01;&#x10A16;&#x10A2E;