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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Trebellianus, post: 3020873, member: 91569&quot;]Recently acquired this pleasing tetradrachm of the slightly obscure <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vima_Kadphises" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vima_Kadphises" rel="nofollow">Vima Kadphises</a> (or &quot;Ooemo Kadphises,&quot; as his Greek subjects apparently knew him). This is undoubtedly the sort of issue for which phrases like &quot;decent for this type&quot; were invented:</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]751168[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>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.</p><p><br /></p><p>On the obverse we&#039;ve got (presumably) a depiction of the man himself, clad in robust nomadic costume: a thick overcoat, heavy boots and some kind of <i>kalpak</i> 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 (<i>Vima Kadphises, the King of Kings, the Great Saviour</i>).</p><p><br /></p><p>The reverse shows a figure the authorities regard as the god Shiva, trident in hand. He&#039;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&#039;s head represent the deerskin in question. In the left field lies (what I understand to be an unidentified) monogram.</p><p><br /></p><p>The wonderfully baroque reverse legend, romanised, reads <i>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</i> (a religious title)).</p><p><br /></p><p>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 <i><a href="https://archive.org/details/catalogueofcoins01lahoiala" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://archive.org/details/catalogueofcoins01lahoiala" rel="nofollow">Catalogue of Coins in the Punjab Museum</a>) </i>all however render it in the Latin script. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kharosthi" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kharosthi" rel="nofollow">Having discovered that Kharosthi is actually available in Unicode</a>, I very naïvely figured it wouldn&#039;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.</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]751208[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>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 &quot;a&quot; sound after it (e.g. <i>Maharajasa</i> is spelled out as <i>m-h-r-j-s</i>), and other vowel sounds are added to consonants by way of diacritical marks. The terminal &quot;a&quot; 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, [ATTACH=full]751224[/ATTACH], seems to be used to represent the <i>thphi</i> sound of <i>Kathphishasa. </i>I still don&#039;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.</p><p><br /></p><p>The Wikipedia article contains <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kharoshthi_letters.jpg" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kharoshthi_letters.jpg" rel="nofollow">a chart of <i>Kharosthi letters on Graeco-Indian Coins</i></a> 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 [ATTACH=full]751224[/ATTACH] as <i>phthi</i> instead of <i>thphi</i>).</p><p><br /></p><p>Anyway after many headaches, I take the legend, in Kharosthi, to be:</p><p><br /></p><p style="text-align: center">[ATTACH=full]751223[/ATTACH] </p><p><br /></p><p>I&#039;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 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vima_Kadphises_with_ithyphallic_Shiva.jpg" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vima_Kadphises_with_ithyphallic_Shiva.jpg" rel="nofollow">the better-preserved gold specimens</a> on Google Images it seems accurate (allowing for some variation in how <i>those</i> render the letters), but beyond the first and last words I don&#039;t get any hits when I try to search for it -- though this might just be a reflection of the lack of online material.</p><p><br /></p><p><font size="3">As a technical note: this forum doesn&#039;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.</font></p><p><br /></p><p>Post some Kushans or difficult scripts or whatever you feel is relevant.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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