Featured Three kinds of ancient coins

No, I don't think so. Chunks of copper were not the greek tradition, nor were dolphin shaped coins. both of these are what I am talking about, starts of other traditions in the mediterranean area that ended up getting stamped out by the more popular greek coinage. The same culture that made the dolphins and the stamped lumps of copper, just like the Roman with their huge lumps of raw copper, eventually gave up their local customs and struck round precious metal coinage. I am sure the same diversity was present in India and China at first before the majority won and local traditions everywhere died off.

Coins or money are weird things. They are what people THINK they are. If all of your neighbors believe only round precious metal, or square silver, or round copper with a hole is the only real "money", then this is a self fulfillling prophecy. They will only accept such things as money, so all coins need to look like that to be accepted.

 

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This is what real money should look like:

Thai 4 Bhat

This coin would make a good sling shot projectile.

 

One of my favorite coins from the medieval Lanna kingdom, (predecessor of Thailand). Almost all are from Chieng Mai or Chieng Sen, though many other cities issued them.

 

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OK - here are some basics on these PMC's

The main Magadha/Mauryan series is very roughly contemporary with Roman Republican but probably way more plentiful. Dates are very approximately known - they maybe start a little after 400 BC and finish a little after 200 BC

19th century guys like Cunningham knew them well but did not really look at them closely, the break through in our understanding came from Kosambi, who spotted they carried a concatenation of exactly 5 marks on the obverse, all applied at the same time, which worked very approximately like hallmarks of English silver.

There seem to have been very strict laws in Ancient India about the transmission of knowledge. Maybe think about it like access to the Bible in medieval Europe. In medieval Europe knowledge of the bible was restricted to a group of priests who knew Latin. In ancient India it was restricted to a group of Brahmins who memorised everything. Writing things down, indeed script itself seems to have only started around the time of Ashoka, about half way through this coin issue, so its roots lay in a pre-writing culture. All the same it was a very sophisticated market driven society with a sophisticated civil service, and the hierarchy of symbols very probably reflected the hierarchy of officials involved.

Coming to Doug's specific questions

1) Why do they come both rectangular and round?

Amongst the later coins most are rectangular with a few round ones. But the rectangular ones have one or more corners clipped off. They seem to stick close to an average weight of 3.43g most of the time (32 rattis) but with quite a lot of individual variation. So another form of al marco production. What they very probably did was beat the silver into big square plates, then scratch a sort of chess board pattern on the plate. Then they cut about half way through the plate along the scratched lines, and snapped rows off as strips, and then individual coins off the strips. (anyone who has cut and snapped plasterboard will see the characteristic marks on the edge of mint state PMC's). But then they went around snipping corners and one would guess the snippings got remelted and made into the smaller number of round coins

2) Why is Doug's coin so common?

Well - it is the type known as GH 574 - a late coin with a reverse mark that probably indicates it was made at Taxila or there abouts - in North West India. So here are a couple of reasons

a) Its a very late period Imperial coin. The Mauryan Empire seems to have rapidly and almost completely collapsed fairly shortly after it was issued. Thus unlike earlier types, a time never came for it to go to the melting pot and get recycled

b) The collapse of the Mauryan Empire was probably very violent, with lots of hoards from that period, from guys who maybe did not live to dig them up

c) It was probably found in Moslem Pakistan, and thus exported, due to limited interest in Hindu History - at least during much of the 20th century - no doubt things are changing.

d) They probably just made a lot of this type anyhow - for reasons now lost.

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As a young guy, I thought cracking the code - the meaning of these 5 symbols - was one of the great unsolved mysteries of numismatics, and I hoped one day to do it myself. I recall writing to one of my old maths lecturers, whose big thing was finite combinatorics, to see if he wanted to get empirical with this matter (no reply)

I never did solve the problem, but I think I did nibble away at the edges of it. Since my very partial result involves Doug's coin, I post a link to it here:

https://www.academia.edu/4645738/Late_Indian_Punchmarked_Coins_in_the_Mir_Zakah_II_Hoard

Rob T

 

Very interesting. The idea of mints set up to pay taxes to a central authority is exactly the opposite of what I always assumed but makes great sense for the Sasanians. I don't know enough about the punchmarked items to have an opinion.

Why does this remind me of the current world system in all too many ways?

 

Punchmarked coins are a special stand-stand-out among ancient coins because of their unclear origins, relatively short span of existence (first struck after 600 BC and phased out upon the arrival of the Greeks in ~180 BC), and the existence of exceptions to the "rule" of how they were produced.

The "first" ancient coins of India were probably the silver "bent bar" Shatamana of Gandhara in present day Afghanistan/Pakistan. These are extremely controversial coins because the area was conquered by the Achaemenids right around the time that these first appeared. They average about 11-11.5g in weight, which is conveniently equal to a shekel or 2 Achaemenid sigloi. They are indisputably unique in terms of fabric, but it is entirely possible that the idea of coinage as "precious metal stamped with the mark of the issuing authority" was not one ever devised by the natives of India.



And while most of the Janapadas of pre-Mauryan India used an assortment of individual punches to make their punchmarked coins, there were those that could arguably be described as die-struck, such as this one of Kuru (500-350 BC?):

The triskeles on the left is the "main" punchmarked of this series and appears on all coins of the janapada. The other comprised of arrows, taurines, and pellets is present on a large number, possibly up to half. It is not clear if they were applied separately or simultaneously.

After the fall of the Mauryan empire, their successor state, the Sunga kingdom, continued to make punchmarked coins for a few decades, then switched to making cast copper coins. Punchmarked coins briefly reappeared in the middle ages in the form of gold coins made by the Chaulukyas and other rajputs.

 

Yes, I agree, and that is in line with Cribb's position. That an idea of coins began in the West (probably Lydia) and spread rapidly both West and East from there. Persia and Egypt kind of ignored it, at least for their central provinces, but it took root quite early in Afghanistan (450 BC ???) and then in NW India (400 BC ???) with these strange bent bars. Then very rapidly on to Gangetic India too.....

That is the position taken by the BM catalogue (Allen, 1936) but I am not completely happy with it. A double siglos is assumed to be very exactly 500 x 4/3 = 666g divided by 60 = 11.1g - and I think that is what we find. But the early bent bars (the short ones) very often weigh 11.5g. It is pretty normal for coins to be bit under the theoretical, but just plain weird for most of them to be over weight!

Italian work from the 1970's suggests a Hittite weight standard back before 1500 BC of about 11.8g. If that is correct then it is possible that Taxila bars are a version of that standard, and the Persian 11.1g standard is another different version of the old Hittite standard - but tweaked down to make it easily convertable to the old Sumerian standard - the one the Persians used for their gold (500g/60).

This however is just a sketch idea - there is a lot we do not know.

Yes - but not quite. Some states, including Kuru, made uniface single mark coins from very early on. But the coin you show is rather special. If you look again I think it is obvious that the 6-arm symbol was applied after the triskeles and actually squashed it rather flat. The 6-arm symbol has a special association with Magadha. All the coins like this seem to come from just one hoard, and the best guess is that when Magadha over-ran Kuru, they captured the royal treasury and overstruck the existing coins there (on the back) - to pass as half-karshapanas in their own system. The chance survival of that hoard is all we know about that event.

This is roughly Mitchiner 1978. I think it is wrong, and Pieper 2013 is closer to the correct answer - but probly we should leave that for another day.....

Rob T

 

Don't get me started

 

I am getting a thought...collecting as a hobby is going to be more than i thought and my curiousity is more so after your article.