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

Quant.Geek · Mar 12, 2018

Ed Snible said: ↑

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.
View attachment 751372 View attachment 751386

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 View attachment 751398 View attachment 751397 View attachment 751396 . 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: View attachment 751399 .

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

𐨨𐨂𐨱𐨪𐨗𐨯

𐨟𐨟𐨪𐨯

𐨨𐨅𐨣𐨪𐨯
Click to expand...

Mauharajasa:

ta-ta-ra-sa:

Ma-e-na-d-ra-sa:

As you can see, it didn't come out right. I'll dig the correct combination and post it here...

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

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

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